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THE ADVENTURES OF 
DETECTIVE BARNEY 








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He wanted to find a cave and crawl into it. . . . And tlien the 
lightning burat in tlie tree-top over his head 



THE ADVENTURES OF 
DETECTIVE BARNEY 


BY 

HARVEY J. O’HIGGINS 

II 

AUTHOR OF “THE SMOKE-EATERS,” “DON-A-DREAMS,” 
“SILENT SAM,” ETC. 

ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

HENRY RALEIGH 



NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 
1915 



Copyright, 1915, by 
Hahvey J. O’ Higgins 

Copyright, 1912, 1913, 1914, by 
P. F. Collier & Son, Inc. 


Published, January, 1915 


JAN 26 1915 





f 


NOTE 


Detective Barney is the hero of the de- 
tective comedy “The Dummy,” by Harvey 
O’Higgins and Harriet Ford, but no attempt 
has been made in the play to dramatize the 
book, and none in the book to novelize the 
play. 



CONTENTS 


I THE BLACKMAILERS 3 

II THE CASE OF PADAGES PALMER ... 48 
HI THOUGH MOUNTAINS MEET NOT ... 90 
IV THE KIDNAPPERS .......... 136 

V THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 185 

VI BARNEY AND KING LEAR ...... 225 


VH BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 


258 


.'I » V « . • -• 


t ' 


V' 


1 ' 


/• 


■i 






*•/ Y 


^ '* i.'-I ' ^ ' , 1 /i ..k‘'i ', • 1. .1 ■ * . 


.'■• I 


*' • '• V ^ ' 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

He wanted to find a cave and crawl into it. . . And 
then the lightning burst in the tree-top over his 


head . Frontispiece ^ 

“It’s a repeat,” Barney said, “an’ they told me to see 
that you got it, this time” 33 

“The old man’s wad !” Snider exulted. “By G — he ’s got 

the swag back too!” 83 4^ 

They found him observing them with a mute and glassy 

stare . 157 ^ 

“You ’ll tread gently for the rest of your days, you sneak- 
ing parasite” 321 ^ 


Mrs. Buntz was soon as indignant as her sister. She read 
the policy aloud — every word of it — ^with fine con- 
viction 253 ^ 



1 

THE ADVENTURES OF 
DETECTIVE BARNEY 



THE ADVENTURES OF 
DETECTIVE BARNEY 


I 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


I 


HE want ad — after the manner of want 



ads — ^had read simply: ‘‘Boy, over 14, 


intelligent, trustworthy, for confidential office 
work, references. Address B-67 Evening 
Express/^ 

Several scores of hoys, who were neither 
very intelligent nor peculiarly trustworthy, ex- 
posed their disqualifications — after the man- 
ner of boys — in the written applications that 
they made. Of these scores, a dozen boys re- 
ceived typewritten requests to call next morn- 
ing at room 1056, in the Cranmer Building, 


4 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
on Broadway, for a personal interview with 
“H. M. Archibald.” But of the dozen, only 
one knew what sort of confidential office work 
might be waiting for him in room 1056. 

He was little Barney Cook. And he kept 
his information to himself. 

The directory, on the wall of the building’s 
entrance, did not assign 1056 to any of the 
names on its list. The elevator boys did not 
know who occupied 1056. The door of 1056 
had nothing on its glass panel but the painted 
number; and the neighboring doors were 
equally discreet. The “Babbing Bureau” 
was the nearest name in the corridor, but its 
doors were marked ‘‘Private. Entrance at 
1070.” 

Nor was there anything in the interior 
aspect of 1056 to enlighten any of Barney 
Cook’s competitors when they came there to 
be interviewed. It was an ordinary outer 
office of the golden-oak variety, with a railing 
of spindles separating a telephone switchboard 
and two typewriter desks from two public set- 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


5 


ties and a brass cuspidor. There were girls at 
the desks and the switchboard. The boys 
were on the settles or at the railing. The 
girls were busy, indifferent, chatty (among 
themselves) and very much at home. The 
boys, of course, were quite otherwise. They 
might have been suspected of having assumed 
a common expression of inert and anxious stu- 
pidity in order that each might conceal from 
all the others the required intelligence with 
which he hoped to win the ‘‘job.” 

Barney Cook alone betrayed the workings 
of a mind. He sat erect — stretching his neck 
— at the end of a settle nearest the gate of the 
railing, watching the door of an inner room 
and scrutinizing every one who came out of 
it. He paid no heed to the girls; he knew 
that they were merely clerks. But when he 
saw a rough-looking man appear, with a red 
handkerchief around his neck, he stared ex- 
citedly. Surely the bandana was a disguise! 
Perhaps the black mustache was false! 

Forty-eight hours earlier, in the imiform of 


6 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


a telegraph boy, Barney had been in the public 
office of the Babbing Detective Bureau; and 
he had been asked to deliver an envelope to 
the advertising department of the Evening 
Ex'press as he went back. The envelope was 
not sealed. It did stick slightly in places — 
but it was not sealed. And it contained the 
want ad. “Confidential office work”! For 
the famous Walter Babbing! 

Young Barney had been delivering tele- 
grams to the Babbing Bureau for months, 
without ever getting past the outer office at 
1070 , and without so much as suspecting the 
existence of these operatives’ rooms and inner 
chambers down the hall. He had seen Bab- 
bing only once, when “the great detective” 
came out with one of his men while Barney 
was getting his book signed. Babbing stood 
in the doorway long enough to say: “I’ll 
meet you at the station. Get the tickets. 
I ’ll send Jim down with my suit-case.” The 
operative rephed: “All right, Chief.” And 
Barney knew that this was Walter Babbing. 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


7 


He was a brisk-looking, clean-shaven, little 
fat man — rather ‘‘a dude” to Barney — with a 
quietly mild expression and vague eyes. 

Barney knew nothing of the scientific theory 
of “protective coloring” in detectives; he did 
not know that the most successful among them 
naturally look least like anything that might 
be expected of their kind. He went out, with 
his book open in his hand, absorbed in study 
of the picture of Babbing that had been photo- 
graphed on his instantaneous young mind. 

Subsequently, he decided that he had seen 
Walter Babbing without any make-up, in the 
private appearance that he reserved for office 
use among his men. And he was assisted to 
this conclusion by his knowledge of the ad- 
ventures of Nick Carter which he read on the 
street cars, in the subways, on the benches in 
the waiting room of the telegraph office, or 
wherever else he had leisure. And it was the 
influence of these Nick Carter stories that had 
brought him now to 1056 in his Sunday best, 
with his hair brushed and his shoes polished. 


8 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


as guiltily excited as a truant, having lied to 
his mother and absented himself from his work 
in the wild hope of getting employment — con- 
fidential and mysterious employment — in the 
office of the great Babbing. 

He was a rather plump and sturdy youth 
of sixteen, with an innocent brightness of face, 
brown-eyed, black-haired, not easily abashed 
and always ready with a smile. It was a dim- 
pled smile, too; and he understood its value. 
In spite of his boyish ignorance of many things 
outside his immediate experience — such as fa- 
mous detectives, for example — ^he knew his 
world and his way about in it; he met the 
events of his day with a practical understand- 
ing; and when he did not understand them he 
disarmed them with a grin. He was confi- 
dent that he could get this job in the Babbing 
Bureau, in competition with any of the 
“boohs” who were waiting to dispute it with 
him, unless some one among them had a 
“pull.” Being an experienced New Yorker, 
it was the fear of the pull that worried him. 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


9 


He waited alertly on the edge of his settle, 
watching for an indication that the interviews 
with ‘‘H. M. Archibald” were to begin, and 
ready to rise and thrust himself forward as 
the first applicant. For a moment he did not 
recognize Babbing when the detective entered, 
from an inner office, in a spring overcoat and 
a fight felt hat. 

He had a small black satchel in his hand. 
He spoke to the telephone girl. Barney 
heard her ask: “The Antwerp?” Babbing 
added: “Until three o’clock.” 

He came towards the gate of the railing, 
and Barney rose to open it for him. Bab- 
bing did not appear to notice him, so Barney 
preceded him to the door and opened that 
also. Still Babbing did not heed. “I ’ll take 
your satchel, Mr. Babbing,” Barney said, au- 
thoritatively. And Babbing gave it to him 
in the manner of an absent mind. 

The whole proceeding had been a sudden 
inspiration on Barney’s part, born of a desire 
to distinguish himself, in Babbing’s eyes, from 


10 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


the other prospective ofBce hoys on the settles. 
Now, with Babbing’s satchel in his hand, he 
followed the detective into a well-filled eleva- 
tor, confident of Babbing’s notice; but as they 
dropped in the cage together, he observed that 
the detective was looking over his head, occu- 
pied with his own thoughts. 

Barney got out before him, preceded him 
to the entrance of the building, and stood at 
a revolving door for Babbing to go first. 
Babbing passed him without a glance. A 
taxi-cab was waiting at the curb, and he 
crossed the sidewalk to it, with Barney at his 
heels. While he was speaking in a low tone 
to the driver, Barney opened the cab door 
and held it open for him to get in; and he got 
in, without remark. Barney put the satchel 
at his feet; but the feet, too, were blind; they 
did not move. Barney shut the door, reluc- 
tantly; and the indifferent auto slowly started 
up Broadway, intent upon the internal uproar 
of its own convulsions. 

Barney did not understand that if you are 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


11 


a detective, confronted by an incident which 
you do not understand, you pretend that you 
do not see it, so that you may observe it with- 
out putting it on its guard. He stood look- 
ing after his wasted opportunity, for a re- 
gretful moment. Then he turned and ran 
towards City Hall Park, to get an express 
train in the subway station at the Bridge. 

He knew that the Antwerp — if it was the 
Hotel Antwerp that was meant — was around 
the corner from the subway station at 42nd 
Street. 

Barney wanted that ‘‘job.” Babbing had 
it, so to speak, in his pocket. And with the 
shrewd simplicity of youth, Barney proposed 
to follow and put himself in the way until he 
was asked, impatiently: “Well, boy, what do 
you want?” Then he would say what he 
wanted — and probably get it. 

Although the subway is not so expensive as 
a taxi-cab, it is speedier, in the long run; and 
Barney was standing near the door of the 
Antwerp — somewhat blown but cheerfully 


12 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

composed — ^when Babbing’s car whirred 
around the comer and drew up to the sidewalk. 
Barney opened the cab door and took the 
satchel briskly, with a smile of recognition 
which the detective ignored. When the driver 
had been paid, Babbing turned into the hotel, 
apparently oblivious of his escort; and Barney 
followed undiscouraged, with the bag. 

“Get away, kid,’’ he said to the bell-boy 
who offered to carry it. “Er I ’ll bite your 
ankle.” 

Standing back at a respectful distance, he 
watched the detective get a letter and his room- 
key at the desk. When he went to the ele- 
vator, there was nothing for Barney to do but 
to go after him. In the elevator, Babbing 
said “Eighth,” and busied himself with his 
letter, which he read and pondered on. He 
put it in his pocket and looked Barney over, 
for the first time, with an abstracted eye. 
Barney smiled at him, ingratiatingly. The 
smile met with no response. 

And still Barney was not discouraged. He 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


13 


was not apprehensive. He was not even nerv- 
ous. There was nothing forbidding in the 
mild reserve of the detective’s face. He 
looked like a man of a kindly personality. He 
seemed easy-going and meditative. And Bar- 
ney, of course, was not the first to get that 
impression of him. It was one of the things 
that explained Babhing’s success. 

He led the way down the padded carpet of 
the corridor to his room, and unlocked the 
door, and threw it open for Barney to enter 
one of the usual hotel bedrooms of the Ant- 
werp’s class, with the usual curly-maple fur- 
niture and elaborate curtains and thick car- 
peting. Barney put the satchel on the table, 
and waited in the center of stereotyped luxury. 
“When did Mr. Archibald take you on?” Bab- 
bing asked, aside, as he hung up his hat and 
overcoat. 

“He has n’t taken me on — ^yet,” Barney ad- 
mitted. 

Babbing put on a pair of unexpected spec- 
tacles and got out a ring of keys to unlock his 


14 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


bag. Occupied with that, he asked: ‘'How 
did you know that I was coming here?” 

Barney explained that he had overheard the 
instructions to the telephone girl. 

The detective had begun to take, from his 
satchel, letters, telegrams, typewritten re- 
ports, and packages of papers strapped in rub- 
ber bands, which he proceeded to sort into lit- 
tle piles on the table, as they came. He ap- 
peared to be giving this business his whole at- 
tention, but while his hands moved deliberately 
and his eyes read the notations on the papers, 
he pursued Barney through an examination 
that ran: “How did you know who I was?” 

“I delivered telegrams to your office an’ — ” 

“For what company?” 

“The Western Union.” 

“Why did you leave them?” 

“I wanted to work fer you.” 

“How did you know we wanted a boy?” 

“I saw the ad.” 

“How did you know it was ours?” 

‘T — I delivered it to the newspaper.” 


THE BLACKMAILERS 15 

“Are you in the habit of opening letters that 
are given you to deliver?” 

“No, sir.” 

“Don’t smile so much. You overdo it,” 
Babbing said, without looking up. And his 
merely professional tone of matter-of-fact ad- 
vice sobered Barney as suddenly as if he had 
said : “I understand, of course, that you have 
found your smile very effective, but it does n’t 
deceive me* You ’re not so bland a child as 
you pretend, and I shall not treat you as if 
you were.” 

Barney shifted uncomfortably on his feet. 
The absent-minded ease with which Babbing 
had plied him with questions and caught up his 
answers made him fearful for the approach of 
the moment when the detective should give 
him a concentrated attention and begin forci- 
bly to ransack him and turn him inside out. 

Babbing asked unexpectedly: “How tall 
are you?” 

“About five feet,” Barney answered at a 
guess. 


16 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘'How much do you weigh?” 

“About a hundred — an’ twenty-five.” 

Babbing glanced at him appraisingly, went 
on with his papers again, and said : “When you 
don’t know a thing, say so. It saves time. 
What ’s your name?” 

“Barney. Barney Cook.” 

“Where do you live?” 

Barney gave the number of his home in 
Hudson Street. 

“The Greenwich village quarter?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Irish- Catholic?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“What does your father do?” 

“He ’s dead. He was a policeman. He 
was killed.” 

“What was his name?” 

“Robert E. Cook.” 

“Robert Emmet?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“When was he killed? How long ago?” 

“About eight years.” 


THE BLACKMAILERS 17 

Babbing was still at his papers. ‘Ts your 
mother living?” 

‘‘Yes, sir.” 

“What does she do?” 

“Looks after me an’ my sister.” 

“What does she do for a living?” 

“She rents furnished rooms. Her an’ 
Annie. That ’s my sister.” 

“What does she do with your father’s pen- 

sionr> 

“She puts it all in the bank.” 

“What bank?” 

“I— I dunno.” 

“She does n’t own the house?” 

“JSTo, sir.” 

“Who owns it?” 

“I— I forget.” 

“You went to the parochial school?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

Babbing had found a typewritten report for 
which he had evidently been looking. As he 
crossed the room to the telephone, he asked: 
“Do you smoke cigarettes?” 


18 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“No, sir/’ 

Babbing took down the receiver from its 
hook. “When did you quit?” 

Barney hesitated guiltily a moment. Then 
he answered: “This morning.” 

“Give me room eight-twenty,” Babbing 
said, into the ’phone. He added, to Barney: 
“You can’t work for me, if you’re going to 
smoke. It will spoil your nerve.” And while 
Barney, dumb with incredulous hope, was still 
staring at the implication of that warning, 
Babbing said: “Hello. This is eight-four^ 
teen. Can you get in to see me for a few 
minutes? . . . Yes. . . . Have you received 
that uniform yet? . . . Bring it in with 
you.” 

He hung up the receiver but kept his hand 
on it. “Sit down,” he said to Barney. He 
continued, to the telephone: “Get me one- 
seven-three-one Desbrosses. . . . Hello. . . . 
Archibald. Babbing. ... You have an ap- 
plication there — in answer to our want ad — 
from a boy named Barney Cook. Have you 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


19 


looked up any of his references? . . . He says 
he delivered telegrams to us for the Western 
Union. His father was Robert Emmet Cook, 
a patrolman, killed about eight years ago. 
His mother lives in Hudson Street, where she 
rents furnished rooms. Run it out. ’Phone 
me right away, about the telegraph company 
and the police.” He turned abruptly, to 
scrutinize Barney over his spectacles. And 
Barney, seeing himself engaged if his refer- 
ences proved satisfactory, did not attempt to 
suppress his triumphant grin. 

“Well,” Babbing said, “you don’t look much 
like a plant, — ” 

“No, sir,” Barney admitted, not knowing 
in the least what was meant. . He rose, at the 
end of a successful interview. 

“Sit down,” Babbing said, “your troubles 
have just begun. Come in!” 

II 

That last was in response to a knock at the 
door; and a man entered on the invitation. 


20 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


nonchalantly, with his hat on, carrying what 
proved to be a suit of black clothes on his arm. 
He was a large, dark, breezy-looking, informal 
sort of individual, about thirty-five; and Bar- 
ney at once misplaced him as a Broadway type 
of “rounder” and race-track “sport.” He ig- 
nored Barney and proceeded to drape the 
clothes over the foot of the bed, as if he had 
come merely to bring the suit. Barney did 
not guess that because of his presence the man 
did not speak to Babbing — until Babbing, by 
a question, indicated that it was all right to 
talk. 

“Any one been to see him to-day?” Babbing 
asked. 

“Not a soul,” he answered. “He’s been 
out, this morning, but he did n’t connect.” 

“Snider has picked up some more tele- 
grams.” Babbing held out the report to him. 
“In cipher.” 

“Got their code yet?” 

“No. If we had that, we ’d have everything. 
!We can figure out a word here and there. 


THE BLACKMAILERS 21 

The names are easy. But that ’s as far as we 
can get.” 

They stood together beside the table, their 
feet in a patch of sunlight, their backs to Bar- 
ney, interested in a page of the report which 
Babbing was showing to his operative. 
“ ‘Kacaderm,’ for instance. That ’s ‘Mur- 
dock.’ He ’s one of the men they ’ve been 
bleeding, out there. They take the con- 
sonants ‘m-r-d-c-k,’ reverse them ‘k-c^^r-m,’ 
and fill in vowels. But they do that only with 
the proper names. For instance, this last one : 
‘Thunder command wind kacaderm.’ That 
can’t be solved by reversing consonants.” 

The operative studied the page. “Search 
he said. “Has Acker worked on it?” 

“Yes. It was he that puzzled out the 
names. It ’s not a cryptogram. They have 
some simple method of writing one whole word 
for another. There ’s no use wasting time on 
it. We ’ll have to make our plant to catch 
him writing a message.” 

“I see.” 


22 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Babbing took off his spectacles and began 
to walk up and down the room, twirling them 
by the ear bows. The operative sat on the side 
of the bed, leaning forward, with his hands 
clasped between his knees. He removed his 
derby and gazed thoughtfully into it, as if he 
hoped to find an idea there. It remained 
empty. 

Babbing stopped in front of Barney. 
“Young man,” he said, “I ’m going to send 
you into the next room with a telegram. 
There ’s a man in there — registered as Mar- 
shall Cooper. Remember the name. You ’ll 
give the telegram to him and say ‘Any an- 
swer?’ Watch him. It will be a cipher tele- 
gram that will look as if it had been received 
downstairs. See what he does to make it out. 
He ’ll probably want to answer it; and if he 
does, you may have a chance to see how he 
makes up the answer. He has a writing table 
over at this window — here. If he sits down 
at it, he ’ll have his back to you. Try to see 
what he does. Don’t try to do it by watching 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


23 


him quietly. He ’d notice that. Move 
around and look at the pictures. Don’t try to 
whistle — or anything of that fool sort. Try 
to act as you would if you were a bell-boy.” 
He had taken the suit of clothes from the foot 
of the bed. “Go in the bathroom and try 
these on.” 

Afterward, when Barney thought of this 
moment, it seemed to him romantic and excit- 
ing beyond all his wildest young adventurous 
hopes. It seemed to him that he must have 
jumped to his feet with delight. As a matter 
of fact, he rose very soberly and took the 
clothes. His mind was busy with Babbing’s 
directions which he was conning over and re- 
peating to himself, so that he might be sure to 
make no mistakes. He was troubled about 
his abihty to do what was expected of him. 
And he went into the bathroom and took off 
his Sunday twilled serge, and put on the black 
uniform of an Antwerp bell-boy mechanically, 
without thinking of himself as engaged in a 
Nick Carter exploit. Besides, the trousers 


24 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


were too long in the legs, and he had to pull 
them up until they were uncomfortable. 

He heard Babbing answering the telephone, 
but he did not suspect that the detective was 
receiving a confirmatory report, from his office, 
upon Robert Emmet Cook’s record at Police 
Headquarters and Barney Cook’s service with 
the Western Union. Barney was not listen- 
ing to what was going on around him, nor 
thinking of it. His thoughts were in Mar- 
shall Cooper’s room. He was dramatising a 
scene with that gentleman. 

The voices of Babbing and his operative con- 
ferred together imperturbably: 

“How are we going to send him a cipher 
telegram. Chief, if we don’t know his code?” 

“I ’m going to repeat the one he got last 
night from Chicago. ‘Thunder command 
wind kacaderm.’ He has n’t answered it?” 

“Unless by letter. And they would n’t get 
that till to-night.” 

Babbing said: “He’ll not go to the tele- 
graph desk asking questions, because he won’t 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


25 


care to identify himself to the man there. 
That ’s why he goes out to send his messages.’' 

“Suppose he doesn’t let the kid into the 
room at all.” 

“Well, he opens the door. The hoy gives 
him the telegram and asks ‘Any answer’? He 
reads it and sees it ’s the same message that 
he had last night. That ’ll make him forget 
the boy. He ’ll be trying to figure out what 
has happened. And the boy can stand at the 
door and watch him. It ’s worth trying any- 
way. Go and get the telegram ready, Jim.” 

“What is it, again?” 

“ ‘Thunder command wind kacaderm.’ 
Unsigned.” 

“ ‘Thunder — command — wind — kacaderm.’ ” 

“Have you the envelopes?” 

“Yep. Billy has everything in there.” 

“Don’t seal it till I ’ve looked it over.” 

“All right. Chief.” 

The operative — whose name was Cor- 
coran — departed with the unbustling celerity 
of a man accustomed to quick and noiseless 


26 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


movement. Babbing went to the bathroom 
door. “That ’s not so bad,” he said of Bar- 
ney’s uniform. “Turn around.” He settled 
the coat collar with a tug and a friendly pat. 
“Wipe off your shoes with a towel. The halls 
of the Antwerp aren’t as dusty as all that.” 
Barney looked up smiling, and found the de- 
tective’s eyes kindly, amused, encouraging. 
“I ought to send you out to get a new pair,” 
Babbing said, “but there isn’t time. Come 
in here, now, and let ’s go over this again. I 
have an improvement to suggest.” 

He went to the window and stood looking 
out. Barney waited in the center of the room, 
excitedly alert. “You ’re a bell-boy recently 
employed here,” ^ said. “The man at 

the telegraph has said to you : ‘Take this 
up to Mr. Cooper, room eight-eighteen, and 
see that he gets it, this time. It ’s a repeat.’ 
That ’s not according to Hoyle, but it will have 
to do. Cooper won’t know any better, any- 
way. So when you deliver the telegram at 
Cooper’s door, you say: T was to be sure that 


THE BLACKMAILERS 27 
you got this, this time. It ’s a repeat.’ Step 
inside when you give him the message, so that 
he can’t shut the door. And then watch him, 
as I told you before.” 

He stopped. He eyed Barney skeptically. 
“You couldn’t possibly be as innocent as you 
look, could you? Because you ’ll have to do 
some quick lying, you know, if he suspects 
anything.” 

Barney looked sheepish. 

“Here,” Babbing said, suddenly. He took 
a letter from the table and gave it to the boy. 
“Go into the bathroom. No. The door 
opens in. I ’ll go in the bathroom, and you 
can come to the door anS deliver this telegram. 
Let ’s see how you do it.” And he w^nt into 
the bathroom and shut the ddtiruon himself. 

Barney turned the letter oyer in his hands. 
He frowned a moment at the door. Then 
he went up to it and rapped. There was no 
answer. He knocked more loudly. A voice, 
disconcertingly gruff, asked, “What is it?” 

“A telegram, sir,” Barney answered. 


28 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘‘Put it under the door.” 

Barney smiled to himself — ^the cunning 
smile of a child in a game. “They said I was 
to see that you got it, this time. It ’s a re- 
peat.” 

The door was opened a few grudging inches. 
“What ’s that?” 

“They said I was to see that Mr. Cooper got 
it, this time. It ’s a repeat.” 

“Well, I ’m Mr. Cooper. Give it here.” 
He put his hand out, still blocking the half- 
opened door. Barney gave him the letter. 
The door shut in his face. 

Barney blinked at the panels. Then 
he knocked again sharply. Babbing opened 
the door. 

“Well, what is it?” 

“They did n’t give me a receipt form,” Bar- 
ney said. “Will you sign the envelope an’ 
give it back to me?” 

“Have you a pencil?” 

“No, sir,” Barney said. 

“Well, wait there till I find one.’^ 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


29 


Barney tried the door slyly. It opened. 
He edged in, over the threshold. ‘Tf you 
want to send an answer, sir,” he said, ‘T can 
take it.” 

Babbing caught him by the ‘‘cowlick” that 
adorned his ingenuous young forehead. “Get 
out of here,” he laughed, “or I ’ll have you ar- 
rested.” And Barney, as startled as if he had 
been wakened from a dream, grinned con- 
fusedly. “That ’s all right,” Babbing said. 
“If you do it as well as that.” 

“Was I all right?” Barney cried, exulting. 
“Was I?” He knew that he was; he could 
see it in Babbing’s face; but he wanted to 
hear it. And he spoke in the voice of a boy 
playing with a boy. 

Babbing changed his expression. “Yes, 
but this ‘Nick Carter’ stuff,” he said, pointing 
to Barney’s coat on a hook, “you must n’t de- 
stroy your mind with that sort of thing. That 
must stop with your cigarettes.” 

It returned Barney instantly to the hyp- 
ocritical schoolroom manner of a pupil re- 


30 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
proved by his teacher. “Yes, sir,” he prom- 
ised. 

“Well, we ’ll see.” Babbing was non-com- 
mittal and unenthusiastic. “You Ve a lot to 
learn, yet.” 

Barney asked, shyly: “What’s he been 
doin’?” 

“Who?” 

“Mr. Cooper.” 

Babbing turned back to the bedroom. 
“That ’s my business, not yours. You do 
what you ’re told — in my office — and don’t ask 
questions. And don’t discuss cases. That ’s 
another thing to learn. . . . Come in,” he 
called to Corcoran’s knock. 

The operative came in, taking a telegraph 
envelope from his pocket. He gave it to Bab- 
bing, cheerfully silent. The detective put on 
his glasses and scrutinized it. He took out 
the telegram and read it. He compared the 
“time received” with his watch. “That looks 
convincing,” he said. He moistened a finger 
tip and delicately wetted the gummed fiap. 



It’s a repeat,” Barney said, ‘‘an’ they told me to see that you got 
it, this time” 





THE BLACKMAILERS 31 

“We can give it a couple of minutes to dry.” 
He handed it to Barney. He went through 
his pockets for silver. “These are tips you Ve 
received. A dollar on account of salary. He 
may ask you for change. . . . Now don’t be 
over-anxious. If this does n’t work, we ’ll find 
some other way. If he gets suspicious and 
telephones to the desk — or anything of that 
sort — just get in here as quickly as you can, 
and we ’ll protect you. Sit down a minute.” 
He turned to the papers on his table. “Jim,” 
he said, “you remember the disappearance case 
we had in Dayton — the little girl.” 

“Yes?” 

• “Our theory worked out all right. They ’ve 
got a confession from the nigger and found 
the body in the bushes where he buried it. 
Here ’s Wally’s report.”. 

•Corcoran took the paper and sat down to 
read it. “I hope they’ll hang the black — ” 
he said piously. 

Babbing consulted his watch. “Mr. Bell- 
boy,” he said at last, “you have a telegram for 


32 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

Mr. Cooper in eight-eighteen. Go ahead and 

deliver it.” 

Barney had a sensation of peculiar heavi- 
ness in the knees as he walked stiffly to the 
door. (“They said I was to see that you got 
it, this time.”) Outside, he paused to close 
the door with unnecessary gentleness and make 
sure that the corridor was empty. (“It ’s a re- 
peat.”) Where was 818? He saw 819 
across the hall to his left. He put a finger 
down the back of his neck, and eased his col- 
lar. He cleared his throat of nervousness. 
He walked boldly to 818, raised his small 
knuckles to a panel, and knocked. 

There was no answer. He had put up his 
hand to knock again, when the door opened 
and a tall man in slippers and bathrobe asked, 
“Well?” 

“A telegram for Mr. Cooper,” Barney said 
steadily. “They tol’ me to see that he got it, 
this time. It ’s a repeat.” 

Cooper stood back. “Come in.” His voice 
was pitched low. “What did you say?” 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


35 


Barney came across the threshold and 
Cooper closed the door on him. ‘Tt ’s a re- 
peat,” Barney said, “an’ they told me to see 
that you got it, this time.” He held out the 
telegram. 

Cooper took it nervously. He was a gaunt- 
featured, long-nosed, lean man, with deep 
lines from his nostrils to the corners of his 
thin lips. There was a little patch of lather 
drying on one cheek-bone, and Barney under- 
stood that he had been shaving. He wiped 
his hand on his bathrobe before he took the 
telegram, and he fumbled over it. Barney 
found himself suddenly cool and confident. 
He noticed that Cooper’s hands were very thin 
and very hairy; and he looked at them and 
then slowly looked Cooper over with a curious 
feeling of contempt. It was the contempt 
that accounts for half the daring of spies and 
detectives. People are so easily deceived, so 
easily outwitted. Their attention is so easily 
caught with one hand while the other goes un- 
watojiied. Barney was learning his trade. 


36 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“Why!” Cooper said. “I got this last 
night.” 

“May be you did n’ answer it,” Barney sug- 
gested. “It ’s a repeat.” 

He puzzled over it. “Well,” he said, 
“I — ” His voice faded out in the tone of ab- 
straction. He turned and shuffled across the 
room to his writing desk, his eyes on the tele- 
gram. Unconscious of Barney’s craning 
watchfulness, he took a small cloth-bound 
volume from an upper drawer of the little 
escritoire and turned the printed pages, com- 
paring the words in the message with words in 
the book. The code book! 

“If you want to send an answer,” Barney 
said boldly, moving down towards him, “I 
could take it.” 

He did not reply. He sat down to the desk 
and took a pencil and wrote, and consulted the 
book carefully with his pencil point on the 
page, and came back again to the message, and 
returned to find another page in the book. 
“No, that ’s all right,” he said, finally. He 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


37 


tore the telegram and retore it into tiny pieces. 
“There ’s no answer.” He made as if to 
throw the torn paper into the waste basket, 
and then he checked himself. “Wait a 
minute,” he said, rising; and Barney under- 
stood that he was to have a tip. 

Cooper shuffled off to the bathroom in his 
slippers. 

Barney, as pale as a thief, darted to the 
secretary and crammed the little code book into 
his pocket. 

When Cooper returned to the room, the 
bell-boy was standing near the door looking 
up at a framed engraving. He took the dime 
that Cooper gave him, and said stiffly, 
“Thanks,” but without raising his guilty eyes. 
As he went out, he glanced back and saw 
that Cooper was returning to the bathroom. 
Geel 


m 

He was so obviously — so breathlessly — ex- 
cited when he burst in upon the detectives that 


38 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

Corcoran came to his feet at sight of him. 
“What ’s the matter?” 

Babbing jerked off his spectacles. “What 
has happened?” 

“I go-got it,” Barney stammered, tugging 
at the book that stuck in his pocket. 

“Got what?” 

“His— his book.” 

“What!” Corcoran grabbed him roughly by 
the shoulder and snatched the volume from his 
hand. He glanced at its brown cloth cover. 
^'What?'" he cried. And that second “What” 
expressed the extreme of incredulous disgust. 
He held out the book to Babbing who had not 
moved from his seat at the table. “He ’s 
swiped the man’s dictionary!” 

Babbing looked at it. It was a “pocket Web- 
ster,” a cheap abridged edition, on cheap pa- 
per. “Where did you get this?” he asked; 
and there was no kindly personality showing in 
the cold malevolence of his flat eyes. 

“On his desk. I—” 

“Why did you bring it?” 


THE BLACKMAILERS 30 

‘‘Oh, hell!” Corcoran muttered. “This hid 
business 1” 

“That’ll do!” Babbing flared out at him. 
“I ’m in charge of this case.” 

They glared at each other, as if they were 
old enemies, with old jealousies concealed and 
long injustices unforgiven. Corcoran turned 
with a shrug and sat down on the bed. Bab- 
bing rounded on the boy again. 

“Why did you bring this?” 

“Well, gee,” Barney defended himself. 
“As soon as he got the telegram, he beat it to 
his desk an’ yanked this book out of a drawer, 
an’ began to hunt the words up in it, an’ — ” 

“Wait a minute. Corcoran get on watch 
out there. If you hear anything, come back 
for this boy. Take him in to Cooper and tell 
him you ’re the house detective — that you 
caught the boy with this book and he confessed 
he ’d stolen it from eight-eighteen. Give it 
back and ask him not to prosecute — because 
it would hurt the hotel. He won’t anyway. 
And that ’ll hold him quiet till we can get time 


40 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

to turn round. Otherwise, we Ve tipped our 

hand.’’ 

Corcoran was already at the door. He 
went out on the final word. 

“Now,” Babbing said, with perfect suavity, 
“take your time. Show me exactly what he 
did.” 

“Well, look-a-here!” Barney took the 
book. “He got this out o’ the drawer, an’ 
then he sat down this way, an’ got a pencil, 
an’ then he wrote down the telegram — ” 

“Wrote it down? Where? On what?” 

“On a piece o’ paper. An’ then he looks 
in the book, this way, an’ gets a word. An’ 
then he looks at the telegram. An’ then he 
goes back to the book an’ turns over the pages. 
An’ then he—” 

Babbing reached the dictionary from him. 
“Wait.” He put on his spectacles and wrote 
on the back of an envelope: “Thunder com- 
mand wind kacaderm.” Below that he wrote 
it again, reversed, and then several times with 
the words transposed and permuted in all 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


41 


possible orders. He turned to the word 
“thunder” in the dictionary. It was at the 
bottom of the first of the three narrow col- 
umns that filled the page. He studied it. 
He studied the words around it. He turned 
the page, and his eyes widened thoughtfully 
on the word “through” at the bottom of the 
third column. The line read “Through, 
(throo) prep, from.” And on the margin 
the point of a pencil had made a light indenta- 
tion. He turned back to “Thunder”; and on 
the margin there, the pencil mark showed in a 
raised point. 

He wrote, under the word “thunder” on his 
paper, the word “through.” 

He turned to the word “command” in the 
dictionary, but after a prolonged scrutiny he 
wrote nothing. 

He turned to “wind.” And he found, on 
the same page but in another column, the word 
“will” touched with a faint pencil mark. He 
sat back in his chair and his face became medi- 
tatively blank. 


42 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


His eyelids constricted sharply. He wrote: 
‘‘Murdock will come through.” Turning 
back in the dictionary to the word “command,” 
he found “come” standing directly beside it 
in the parallel column of print on the page. 
He looked at Barney and nodded. “Got it!” 
he said, grimly. “Go and bring Corcoran.” 

Barney, almost running — ^but on his tiptoes 
— with the secrecy and the excitement, saw 
himself vindicated to the surprised Corcoran. 
He saw himself the hero of the occasion. He 
had solved the mystery! He had discovered 
the cipher! He signaled imperiously to Cor- 
coran in the hall. The operative came scowl- 
ing. 

When they returned to the room, Babbing 
said: “Sit down there, boy, and keep quiet. 
You scuttle like a rat. . . . Jim, I Ve got his 
method. I want you to send off some mes- 
sages while I ’m translating these. Wire our 
Chicago ofSce: ‘Case 11A393. Case com- 
pleted. Immediately arrest Number Two on 
information in your files.’ Wire Indianapolis 


THE BLACKMAILERS 43 

in the same words to grab Pirie. He ’s Num- 
ber Three. And have Billy ’phone the office 
to get papers and an officer up here, at once, 
for our friend next door. I ’ll hold him till 
they come. Go ahead. I ’ll finish this.” 

He settled down to his task studiously, copy- 
ing out cipher telegrams, and writing between 
the lines the translated words as he found them 
in the dictionary. And in a room that was 
quiet and sunny, working with a little com- 
placent pucker of the lips occasionally, or 
raising his eyebrows and adjusting his spec- 
tacles in a pause of doubt, he looked anything 
but sinister, anything but the traditional 
“bloodhound” on the trail in a man-hunt. 
There was something Pickwickian in his small 
rotundity. The nattiness of his business suit 
gave him an air of conventional unimportance. 

Barney watched him fascinatedly. His 
plump little hands — ^his rather flat profile with 
its small beaked nose and the owlish spectacles 
— his dimpled chin — all reminded the boy of 
some one incongruous whom he could not 


44 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


place. When Babbing took out a white silk 
handkerchief to polish his glasses and buried 
his nose in it before he replaced it in his pocket, 
Barney remembered. It was a bishop who 
had once graced the closing exercises of the 
parochial school by conferring the prizes. He 
had given Barney a “Lives of the Saints.” 

“Now, young man,” Babbing said, “get off 
that uniform. I ’m going in to get a state- 
ment from your Mr. Cooper. If any one 
rings me up, take the number. If any of the 
men come in here, tell them where I am. I ’m 
registered as A. T. Hume. Wait here till I 
come back.” He had taken a small blue- 
metal “automatic” from his hip pocket and 
put it in the side pocket of his coat. He 
gathered up his notes and the dictionary. 
“Don’t make the mistake again of exceeding 
your instructions. You Ve forced our hand, 
already.” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney said, contritely. But 
the door had scarcely closed before he was 
capering. He did a sort of disrobing dance. 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


45 


his face fearfully contorted with grins that 
were a silent equivalent of whoops of delight. 
And it was an interpretative dance. It ex- 
pressed liberation from drudgery and the dull 
commonplace. It welcomed rhythmically a life 
of adventure, in which a boy’s natural pro- 
pensity to lie should be not only unchecked but 
encouraged — ^that should give him, daily, 
games to play, hidings to seek, simple elders 
to hoodwink and masquerades to wear. He 
danced it, in his shirt sleeves, waving his coat 
— and in his shirt tails waving coat and 
trousers. It stopped as suddenly as it had 
begun, and he darted into the bathroom to be 
ready in case he should be called upon. 

He was clothed and sober — crocking himself 
to an ecstatic croon in one of the Antwerp’s 
bedroom rockers — ^when he heard a thudded 
report in the hall. It sounded to him as if 
two books had been clapped together. He 
sat listening. 

Babbing came in. “Get out of here, boy. 
What have you done with that uniform? Put 


46 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

it in my valise. Snap it shut. Hurry. Re- 
port to the office to-morrow morning at eight- 
thirty.” He was at the telephone. “Give me 
the house detective,” he said. “What? Mr. 
Dohn, your house detective.” He put his 
hand over the transmitter. “How much have 
you been earning?” 

“Six dollars a week — ^with the tips.” 

“You’ll start at twelve. Hurry up. Get 
out of here. To-morrow morning at eight- 
thirty.” 

Barney started for the door, reluctantly. 

“Hello. Dohn? This is Babbing. Get 
up here as quick as you can with a doctor. 
That Chicago swindler in eight-eighteen has 
shot himself. Through the mouth. He ’s 
blown the back of his head out. Hurry up!” 

Barney, slamming the door behind him, fled 
down the hall, frightened, aghast, but with a 
high exultant inner voice still crooning tri- 
umphantly: “I’m a de-i^c-tive! I ’m a de- 
^^c-tive!” Through the mouth! The back of 
his head out! Even in his horror there was a 


THE BLACKMAILERS 


47 


pleasurable shudder, for he had all a boy’s 
healthy curiosity about murder, shootings and 
affairs of bloodshed. ‘T ’m a de-f^c-tive !” 
And he hurried to tell his mother of his new 
job, aware that she would cry out against it 
— till he explained: ‘T start at twelve a 
week.” That would settle it with her. ‘T ’m 
a detective ! I ’m a detective I” 


II 


THE CASE OF PADAGES PAI.MER 

I 

B arney, as a telegraph boy, had once 
been summoned to a dressing room in 
Daly’s Theatre, by an indignant star who had 
refused to entrust his message to any but 
official hands. And he had once been called 
to a grated office in the Tombs to take a tele- 
gram from a prosperous-looking elderly gen- 
tleman in handcuffs. It was chiefly from the 
memories of these two experiences that Bar- 
ney constructed his expectation of what he 
was to And when he should enter the private 
offices and operatives’ rooms of the Babbing 
Detective Bureau, to report for duty. 

As, for example: — Babbing, in his sanctum, 
at a make-up table, gumming a false mustache 

48 


CASE OF PAD AGES PALMER 49 

to his lip; his dresser waiting to hand him a 
wig and a revolver; the room picturesquely 
hung with costumes and disguises, handcuffs 
and leg-irons, dodgers that offered rewards 
for desperate captures (“dead or alive”) and 
sets of burglar’s tools and the weapons of out- 
lawry — the latter arranged decoratively on 
the walls after the manner of a collection of 
trophies. 

And Barney’s better judgment accepted 
that picture from his inebriated young im- 
agination without really knowing that he had 
accepted it — until he was called from the outer 
public office of the bureau into Babbing’s pri- 
vate room, and found the famous detective 
sitting at a table-desk, in a swivel chair, read- 
ing his morning mail like the manager of any 
successful business at work in the office of 
any successful business manager. “Sit 
down,” Babbing said, without looking at him. 

Barney sat down, against the wall. He 
was conscious of the stimulating disappoint- 
ment — the interested surprise in disillusion — 


50 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


that reality gives to the alert romantic mind. 
So to speak. 

The office was as commonplace and average 
as Babbing’s conventional business clothes. 
There was nothing on the walls but some 
framed photographs of office groups. There 
was no furniture but the desk and the chairs. 
There was nothing on the desk but telephone 
instruments, pens and ink, paper-weights, and 
some shallow wire baskets that were filled with 
letters, telegrams and typewritten reports. 
There was, in fact, nothing interesting in the 
room but Babbing; and Babbing looked as 
uninteresting and ordinary as the room. 

His letters had been opened for him, the 
pages flattened out, and the envelopes at- 
tached to them with paper-clips. His right 
hand reached a sheet from a wire basket at 
one side of the desk, and put it on the blotter 
before him; his left hand held it a moment for 
his eyes to read it, and then carried it to one 
of the baskets on the other side of the desk and 
dropped it automatically in its proper place; 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 51 

his right hand, meanwhile, had produced the 
next letter. His eyes moved only from sheet 
to sheet. “Did you tell your mother about 
the case you were on yesterday?’’ 

“No, sir.” 

The left hand passed a letter back to the 
right. The right hand dropped it in the waste 
basket. “What did you tell her?” 

“I tor her I had a new job.” 

“As a detective?” 

“I was scared to tell her that. She ’d ’a’ 
thought it was the same as a policeman.” 

“Well?” The left hand pressed a call but- 
ton. “Suppose she did?” 

“She ’d ’a’ thought I was goin’ to get killed.” 

Babbing turned his head to look over his 
glasses at the boy. “Like your father?” 

Barney smiled an apology for the absurdity 
of mothers. “Yes, sir.” 

A clerk opened the door. Babbing tossed a 
letter across the table to him. “Find out who 
that fellow is. Right away.” 

The clerk reported: “Mr. Snider has just 


52 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


come in.” Babbing continued with his read- 
ing. The clerk went out, ignored even by 
Barney — as the commander’s civilian secre- 
tary would be ignored by a young uniform. 

‘‘So you told her what?” 

“I tol’ her I was waitin’ in an office with a 
telegram yeste’day, ’n’ — They wanted an 
office boy, ’n’ — They offered me twelve a 
week. An’ I took it.” 

Babbing apparently forgot him in the pe- 
rusal of a two-page letter closely typed. His 
eyes parted with it reluctantly. “Did you 
tell any one else?” 

“No, sir.” 

“I see,” Babbing said. And Barney was 
not aware that he had stood a test of character 
and passed an examination in discretion. He 
had no suspicion that Babbing’s absent-minded 
manner was almost as much a disguise as if 
it had been put on with spirit-gum. He was 
waiting for Babbing to finish with the letters 
and direct him to his work. 

“Don’t use the public office, hereafter,” 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 53 

Babbing said. “Come in at 1056.” He 
turned to a ’phone. “Tell Snider I’ll see 
him.” He pressed a call button. “You’ll 
have to start by learning to speak the English 
language,” he admonished Barney. “We 
haven’t cases enough on the Bowery to keep 
you working where people say T toler I was 
waiten’ when they mean T told her I was 
waiting.’ ” He changed the switches on an 
office ’phone. “Bring me my schedule.” He 
said to Barney: “Stay where you are. I ’ll 
have something for you in a moment.” 

Doors began to open, unexpectedly, on all 
sides. A stenographer appeared, with a note 
book, sat down to face Babbing across the 
desk, and prepared himself and his fountain 
pen to take dictation. Archibald, the office 
manager — a grizzled old man, with the lean 
mouth of a prelate — ^brought a list of Bab- 
bing’s appointments for the day and discussed 
them with him, deferentially. An operative, 
who proved to be “Chal” Snider from Chi- 
cago, drifted in as if he were casually inter- 


54 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

ested, and shook hands with ‘‘The Chief/’ and 
drew a chair up at one side of the desk, and 
made himself at home, with his ankle on his 
knee and his hat on his ankle. The day’s 
work had begun. 

To Barney, watching, it became as bewil- 
dering as the smoothly intricate activity of a 
complicated machine. Babbing dictated let- 
ters in a leisurely undertone that was continu- 
ally intermitted for telephone calls, the arrival 
of opened telegrams, corroboratory references 
to filed records, consultations with Archibald, 
directions to operatives, and above and around 
and under it all an interested reciprocation of 
talk with Snider. “Hello? Yes. Where 
are you? Have you got the goods on him? 
I see. Who’s with you? Can you get in 
to see me? I ’ll relieve you with Corcoran. 
Three-thirty this afternoon.”. . . “Take 
this. William P. Sarrow, and so forth. 
Dear Sir. Yours of the fifteenth. Regret 
that I ’m unable to meet you and so forth. 
Previous engagements in Chicago on that 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 55 

date. Suggest the twenty-seventh.”. . . 
‘‘Wire that fellow to stop sending me tele- 
grams or he ’ll queer the whole plant. Sign 
it Adam Hansen.”. . . “Yes, Chal? Did he 
bite?” 

And because Snider was telling a connected 
story — a patiently connected story in spite of 
all distractions — Barney’s confused attention 
slowly concentrated on him, 

Snider was becoming bald; his hair was 
parted down the middle with mathematical 
precision, as perfectly aligned as the ribs and 
backbone of a kippered herring. He spoke 
rather mincingly, smiling, but never moving 
his hands. He had an air of pudgy inertia — 
an inoffensive sedentary air, good-natured — 
and a look of credulity. He made a specialty 
of confidence men. He was telling about one 
who had been operating in Chicago under the 
name of Charles Q. Palmer. 

Palmer had advertised, in the want columns, 
that he wished to buy a hotel property in Chi- 
cago, and the owner of the old Stilton House 


56 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


had answered the ad. Palmer was living in 
splendor at the La Salle; the owner of the 
Stilton lunched with him there, talked terms, 
and convinced himself that Palmer had money 
and knew something about the hotel business. 
They inspected the moribund Stilton House 
together. Palmer saw possibilities in it. He 
paid $200 for a two weeks’ option on the prop- 
erty and took the only good room in the house, 
in order to audit the books at his leisure and 
consider a plan of business rehabilitation. The 
proprietor assisted him, deferred to him, flat- 
tered him, and secretly chuckled over him. A 
price of $50,000 was agreed upon. Palmer af- 
fected a brand of expensive Havana cigars, 
called Padages Palmas; and the proprietor 
added a box of them to his show-case stock for 
Palmer’s use. They became as intimately 
friendly as it is possible to become in a busi- 
ness deal where the seller has to maintain a 
consistent indifference because he is getting 
too much for his goods. 

“The thing that sticks in Ms crop,” Snider 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 57 

said, ‘‘is those millionaire cigars. Palmer 
smoked two boxes of them. The old man 
squeals about it worse than anything.” 

“What are they? A perfecto?” Babbing 
asked, with the air of a teetotaler showing curi- 
osity about wines. 

“No,” Snider explained, “they’re like a 
panatela, only longer. They ’re a little 
longer than a lead pencil and about as thick. 
They ’re some smoke.” 

Babbing gave Archibald a telegram that he 
had been reading. “Wire them I can’t take it 
up personally, but if they ’ll turn it over to 
our branch office there, I ’ll be on later, to di- 
rect the investigation. . . . What was it, 
Chal? The same old game?” 

“Sure,” Snider smiled. “At noon on the 
fifteenth, the day the option expired, he 
bought the hotel with a New York draft for 
fifty-five thousand, and opened an account at 
the old man’s bank with a check for the extra 
five thousand which the old man wrote. He 
was carrying a little black handbag full of 


58 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


furniture catalogues and decorator’s estimates 
and plans he had drawn for remodehng the 
ground floor of the Stilton. He got five hun- 
dred under the old man’s nose, put it in the 
bag, and went off to make a deposit with the 
contractor who was to do the remodeling. 
One of the boys from the hotel happened to 
be at the Central depot about three o’clock 
and he thought he saw Palmer going through 
the gates; but he didn’t speak of it until the 
old man began to worry because Palmer 
had n’t turned up for dinner. He was afraid 
Palmer had been black-jacked! 

“Next morning, he found out, at the bank, 
that Palmer had drawn all but fifty dollars of 
his five thousand. And the New York draft 
turned out to be phoney. 

“They brought the case to us, but Palmer 
had made a clean getaway. There was noth- 
ing in his trunk but some hotel sheets and bun- 
dles of old newspapers to give it weight. 
Our boys are at work on it.” 

Babbing had finished his correspondence. 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 59 

He began to walk up and down the room in 
an idle interval. ‘‘He’s probably in town 
here, now.” 

“What makes you think so, Chief?” 

“Why didn’t you wire us? That three- 
o’clock train is one of the slowest on the line. 
It does n’t get here till eight-thirty next 
night.” 

“We didn’t have the case till late yesterday 
morning. And there was nothing to show he 
came this way.” 

“He ’d arrive last night. Did you get a 
good description of him?” 

“Yes, but he was wearing a beard and mus- 
tache.” 

“How old?” 

“They say about thirty-five, and heavy — a 
hundred and seventy or may be more. Five 
foot eight or nine. Dressed to look like a 
prosperous hotel man. Light eyes, bluish 
gray. Nothing peculiar about him.” 

Babbing was standing at the window look- 
ing out over the lower roofs of wholesale 


60 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
houses to the ferries of the North River and 
the docks and chimneys of the Jersey shore. 
It was an invitingly clean and bright Spring 
day. ‘T ’d like to try a long shot at that fel- 
low,” he said. And little Barney’s heart 
leaped with the blind instinct of a setter pup 
who sees preparations for the hunt. 

Snider took his hat from his ankle and his 
ankle from his knee. “At Palmer?” 

Babbing drifted back to his desk and sat 
down. 

“Got a hunch, Chief?” 

Snider asked it in the wistful manner of 
envy interrogating the inscrutable. Babbing 
stared at him, thoughtfully. Snider blinked 
and waited. Babbing said, at last: “It was 
raining hard last night at eight-thirty. . . . 
He would n’t shave on the train.” 

Snider put his hat on the floor and leaned 
forward intently. “We could n’t run out all 
the barber shops in town, could we?” 

“He ’d go to a hotel, and get it off in his 
room.” 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 61 

Snider’s expression indicated that there 
were almost as many hotels as barber shops. 

Babbing glanced at his watch. “I can lo- 
cate him in an hour if I can locate him at all.” 
He rose briskly. ‘‘Explain to Archibald. 
I ’ll ’phone to tell you where I am, as soon as 
I get in touch with anything. Where ’s my 
bag? Dump those reports into it.” He 
opened the door of a clothes closet in a corner 
by the window and took out a soft black felt, 
a black raincoat, and an umbrella. He put 
on the coat, and it looked as provincial as a 
linen duster. He shook out the rolled um- 
brella, untidily. “Come on, boy,” he said 
to Barney. “Carry that bag.” Barney 
grabbed it eagerly. “This is no day to be in 
school, is it?” Babbing said to him at the 
door. And Barney’s throat was so choked 
with excitement that he could only gulp and 
grin. 

Snider, seeing them go, had the puzzled eye- 
brows and the doubtful smile of the man who 
does not believe that you can do it but would 


62 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
like to know how you propose to begin. To 
find, in the city of New York, a swindler 
whom you have never seen, of whom you have 
no accurate description, who may not have 
come to New York at all, and who will be 
carefully concealing himself if he has come! 

II 

No such doubts as Snider’s occupied Bar- 
ney’s mind, of course. He had other things 
to think of. He had his first ride up Broad- 
way in a taxi-cab, for instance — whirring 
along in a bouncing rush of luxury whose in- 
credible cost grew on the taximeter so fast 
that it took his breath away like a Coney 
Island chute, and he held back against the 
cushions, with his eyes on the dial, delight- 
fully appalled. And he had the confused 
emotions of being outfitted in a round felt hat, 
such as college boys are supposed to favor, and 
a pair of enameled-leather shoes, which Bah- 
hing bought for him in a Broadway shop while 
the cab waited at the door. Two dollars for 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 63 

the hat and five dollars for the shoes! Gee! 
And then the meter began again — ^measuring 
Fifth Avenue in dimes. 

He had been aware in the shop that Bab- 
bing was posing as his father and enjoying the 
part; and he had had an awful moment of 
fear that there might be holes in his stockings 
when the clerk unlaced his shoes. There 
were none. A woman, whom he vaguely re- 
called as his mother, had darned those stock- 
ings for him in a Cinderella world that had 
since been lost in the whirr of a fairy god- 
father’s golden chariot. He caught Babbing 
smiling at him in the chariot; and he snick- 
ered excitedly. 

When the cab stopped, Babbing reached the 
handle of the door and said “Keep right up 
with me, now, but don’t open your mouth”; 
and Barney stepped out of the cab as if it 
had been an aeroplane, and found himself on 
the earth again, in front of the Hotel Haarlem 
on 42nd Street near the Grand Central sta- 
tion. He defended Babbing’s satchel from 


64 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

the doorman while Babbing ransomed himself 

from the taximeter. 

The detective, in his raincoat, with his um- 
brella, wandered into the gilded lobby of the 
Haarlem, looking about him simply. He 
found the cigar stand, and approached it, with 
Barney, as if it were a booth at a county fair. 
The clerk saw them coming. It showed in 
his face. 

Babbing said: “Padages Palmas.” 

The clerk did not move. He was New 
York accosted by the provinces. “What did 
you say?” 

Babbing regarded him a moment, mildly 
thoughtful. He cleared his throat. “Young 
man,” he said, “I want a seegar called the 
Padages Palmas. It ’s a fairly well-known 
Havana, but the easiest way for you to tell 
it, when you see it, is to read the name on the 
band around the middle.” 

The clerk had turned his back to get a box 
from the shelves behind him. His ears were 
red. 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 65 


“Yes,” Babbing said, “that ’s the one. 
Are these fresh?” 

“I opened it myself yesterday.” The box 
was still full. 

“I don’t much like them fresh.” 

The clerk tried to look his indifference. 
“We don’t keep—” 

“You can keep four of those,” Babbing cut 
in cheerfully and passed on. Barney fol- 
lowed him. And Barney could feel the clerk’s 
eyes witheringly on his back. 

This was good fun, but Barney did not see 
the drift of it. When they issued on 42nd 
Street again and started to cross towards the 
Beaumont, he began to understand. 

They mounted the Beaumont’s marble 
steps together and approached the cigar 
counter. The clerk, here, was an older man 
who was perhaps accustomed to serving mil- 
lionaires in shabbiness. Babbing found the 
box in the showcase and pointed to it. The 
clerk whisked it out deftly. Babbing took 
two. “Do you sell many of these?” 


66 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

‘‘Yes, sir,” he said. “Quite a number.” 

“How many?” 

“Well, I couldn’t say, exactly. I’ve sold 
six this morning.” 

Babbing was slow about getting the cigars 
into his waistcoat pocket; and he was slow 
about getting his money out. “Six, eh? 
Counting mine?” 

“Yes. Another gentleman took four.” 

“I ’ll bet that was Charlie,” Babbing com- 
mented to Barney. “Clean-shaven man with 
blue eyes?” he asked the clerk. “Heavy 
set?” 

“I think you ’re right,” the clerk replied, 
busying himself with his cash register. “I 
did n’t notice his eyes, but I think you ’re 
right. . . . Thank you. Nice day?” 

Babbing grunted, non-committally, and 
went to the desk. He gave Barney his um- 
brella to hold, while he put on his glasses to 
consult the register. He turned to the arrivals 
of the previous night. Among the names of 
visitors from Buffalo and Albany, there was 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 67 
the florid signature of a Spenserian caligraph- 
ist who had arrived singularly from Washing- 
ton, D. C. He was “Thos. Sullivan.” 

Babbing put up his glasses, resumed his 
umbrella and led the way to a leather sofa. 
“I think our man is here,” he said to Barney, 
“under the name of Thomas Sullivan. He 
writes like a forger, anyway. WeVe got to 
pick him up and feel him out. I ’m going 
outside to telephone to him. If he ’s in his 
room, I ’ll give him a stall. If he is n’t, I ’ll 
have him paged. Thomas Sullivan. You 
follow the boy around. Nobody ’ll notice 
you. They ’ll think you ’re looking for some 
one. Spot Sullivan if the boy flnds him, and 
show him to me when I come back. Then 
we ’ll get together and rope him.” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney said. 

“The telephone booths are down that hall 
at the left of the desk. There ’s a parcel rack 
there, and you ’d better check this bag till we 
know what we ’re going to do. The dining- 
room ’s at the end of the hall. Sullivan may 


68 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


be at breakfast. If any one asks you any 
questions, you ’re looking for your uncle. 
I ’m your uncle. Sit here for two minutes. 
Then get over by the call desk.” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney said. 

Babbing pursued his placid way to the door, 
and Barney sat back in the sofa. He had no 
doubt that Sullivan was the swindler Palmer, 
but he could not guess how Babbing had come 
almost directly to the Beaumont to locate him. 
He puzzled over it, happily. In the back- 
ground of his thoughts, he was saying to him- 
self: “Gee, this job’s great r 

When his two minutes had measured them- 
selves on the clock, he went to check his bag. 
He located the telephone booths. He made 
sure that the dining-room had not been 
shifted. As he returned to the lobby, a call 
boy, circulating among the easy chairs and 
smoking tables in front of the news stand, 
suddenly began to crow “Mr. Sullah-t;an/ 
Mr. Sullah-t;a7i/” A cold tingle of excite- 
ment ran down Barney’s spine and struck for- 


CASE OF PAD AGES PALMER 69 

ward into his solar plexus. His vital organs 
sank inside him, rallied, and rose exultingly. 

“Mr. Sullah-t;aii/ Mr. Sullah-t;ari.'^'' 

Mr. Sullivan did not reply. The boy 
turned down the hall to the dining-room, and 
Barney sauntered after him. “Mr. Sullah- 
vanr The head waiter at the door bent in- 
dulgently to ask Barney: “One?” Barney 
mumbled that he was looking for his uncle. 
Standing in the doorway, he searched the 
tables anxiously. “Mr. Sullah-i;a7i/” A 
man sitting alone at a far window, signaled 
to the bell boy. They conferred together. 
The man shook his head. The boy went on. 
“Mr. Sullah-l;a7^/” 

Barney had seen his float bob to a nibble. 

The boy passed him on his way out, and 
Barney followed. But there were no more 
nibbles — neither in the bar, the cafe, the grill, 
the barber shop, the wash-room, nor anywhere 
else. The boy went back to the desk. Bar- 
ney returned to the telephones and stood look- 
ing regretfully down the hall at the door of 


70 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
the dining-room where he had seen his hope. 
If it had only been Palmer! If they had only 
landed that bite! 

Babbing joined him there. “He did n’t get 
him,” Barney reported. Babbing nodded. 
They went to their seats on the sofa. “He ’ll 
be back,” Babbing said. “He hasn’t given 
up his room.” 

Barney sighed. “I thought we had him.” 

“How so?” 

“A man in the dinin’ room stopped that 
bell-hop an’ then turned him down.” 

Babbing rose at once. “That ’s our man.” 

“But he turned him down.” 

“Come on. Show me where he is. You ’re 
asleep.” They were crossing the lobby, and 
Babbing was talking in a low, indifferent, 
chatty tone. “His name isn’t Sullivan. As 
soon as he learned that the boy had a telephone 
call, he knew it couldn’t be for him. None 
of his friends in town would call for him by 
that name. Is there an empty table near 
him?” 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 71 

“I — I don’t know.” 

Babbing slowed his pace. ‘‘My name ’s 
Thomas Oliphant,” he said. “We ’ll get a 
table near him. Then you go to the telephone 
and call up the office — one-seven-three-one 
Desbrosses — and get Chal Snider. Tell him 
I ’m in the dining-room here, and I want to be 
paged as Thomas Sullivan. Make him insist 
on the ‘Thomas.’ Don’t forget that. Tell 
him they ’ve paged me as Sullivan and I don’t 
answer. Then join me at the table. Sulli- 
van ’ll stop the boy again. I ’ll break in on 
him. I ’m expecting a call. There ’s prob- 
ably a mistake in the name. Thomas Sullivan 
for Thomas Oliphant. Do you understand? 
That ’ll give us an introduction to him. 
Where is he? Don’t point.” 

They were at the dining-room door. 
“There he is. Over at that last window.” 

“I see. I ’m your rich uncle from Kansas 
City. You ’re Barney Cook, my New York 
nephew. Go ahead and telephone. Get me 
a Tribune"^ And Babbing, refusing the 


72 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


oflBces of the girl at the coat rack, went to meet 
the head-waiter with all his encumbrances of 
hat, rain-coat and umbrella. He had evi- 
dently a somewhat countrified reluctance to 
trust his things out of his sight. 

The multiplicity of instructions which Bar- 
ney had to remember weighed him down to 
deliberate and cautious movement. He went 
slowly to the telephone; it took him some time 
to get the Babbing bureau; he gave his mes- 
sage to Snider hesitatingly, cautiously, in 
veiled terms, for fear some one might over- 
hear him; and he was almost back to the din- 
ing-room before he recollected that he was to 
get a Tribune, Consequently, Babbing, in 
his spectacles, seated at a side-table, back to 
back with the suspected Sullivan, was conclud- 
ing his order to the waiter when Barney joined 
them; and it was evident that there had been 
some difficulty over the menu. “Now, oat- 
meal porridge; mind that!” Babbing said. 
“Real oatmeal. No cattle mashes or health 
mushes for me. Sit here, boy.” He put 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 73 

Barney at right angles to him. “And cream. 
Plenty of it. I don’t care what it costs. 
And here. Wait a minute. I don’t want my 
bacon fried to a cinder, either.” 

He was talking in an insistent, querulous 
grumble. The waiter kept saying “No, sir. 
Yes, sir,” with a sort of cool servility that was 
professional to the point of contempt. Bar- 
ney glanced at Mr. Sullivan. He was sipping 
his coffee, with his head turned slightly. Bar- 
ney could see that he was “getting an ear full.” 
The waiter departed. 

“Well,” Babbing asked, “did you get 
them?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“What did they say?” 

“They said they ’d call you up.” 

“Well, they ’d better hurry,” he blustered. 
“If they don’t want my money, I can find 
lots of people in this town that do. Did 
they say they had those Bonanza shares for 
me?” 

“They did n’t say.” 


74 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

“Huh! Give me that Tribune:" He 
spread the pages impatiently. “I don’t see 
why these New York papers don’t have some 
Western news in them.” And Sullivan, turn- 
ing, took an appraising look at him over the 
shoulder. 

“There is n’t a line here from Kansas City,” 
Babbing complained. “A New York news- 
paper ’s the most provincial sheet in the uni- 
verse, bar none!” 

“Aw, gee. Uncle,” Barney laughed. “Quit 
knockin’ little ol’ New York.” 

“Boy!” Babbing said sternly, “you talk as 
if your maw had raised you on the Bowery. 
Where did you ever learn to speak like that? 
If that ’s the sort of grammar you get in your 
New York public schools, y’ ought to be 
ashamed of them.” 

Barney had no reply to make, and his 
uncle’s eye forbade him to make any. He had 
“caught on to” the game that Babbing was 
playing, and he was enjoying it precociously; 
but Babbing was evidently not willing to have 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 75 

him join in it. They waited, in silence, for 
the call boy. 

And when the call boy came, crying “Mr. 
Thomas Sullivan” the game developed with 
the most prosperous rapidity. Babbing in- 
terrupted the colloquy between the uneasy 
Sullivan and the boy, and claimed the call. 
“My name ’s Oliphant. I Ve been waiting 
here all morning for a telephone message, and 
these idiots go around bawling ‘Sullivan! 
Sullivan !’ when I bet they want Oliphant. If 
you Ve no objection, I ’ll take this call Mr. 
Sullivan—” 

“None whatever,” Sullivan said affably. 
“I ’m sure it ’s not for me.” 

“Come on, boy. Show me the ’phone.” 

As he passed, he laid his hand on Barney’s 
shoulder, and gave him a warning squeeze. 
It was needed, for as soon as he was out of 
hearing, Sullivan turned to Barney with a 
plump, suave smile. “Is n’t that Thomas Oli- 
phant of Kansas City?” 

Barney nodded cheerfully. 


76 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘T thought so. I Ve heard of him. Well, 
well! So that ’s Thomas Oliphant.” 

Barney grinned. ‘T guess everybody out 
there knows Uncle Tom.” 

“Did I understand that he ’s buying mining 
stock.” 

“Yep. I guess so. He’s got money to 
burn.” 

not from Kansas City?” 

Barney shook his head scornfully. 

“I wonder if he knows my brother-in-law, 
Billy Smith.” 

“I dunno. You better ask him,” 

“What does he do?” 

“What does who do?” 

“Your uncle.” 

“What does he doT 

“Yes. What business is he in?” 

“Say!” Barney answered. “What are you 
tryin’ to do to me? You know what he does 
as well as I do.” 

Sullivan said hastily: “Well, I thought he 
might have retired, and — Well, well! I 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 77 


must speak to him when he comes hack. Tom 
Ohphant, eh? It ’s a small world. Well, 
well!” And Barney saw their fish on the 
hook. 

The fish proceeded to climb up the line and 
fight his way into the creel as soon as Babbing 
returned; and Babbing at first held him off, 
suspiciously. Yes, he was Thomas Oliphant 
of Kansas City. No, not cattle. Leather, 
sir; leather. William Smith? No, he didn’t 
know William Smith. He thought he had 
heard of William Smith, but couldn’t place 
him. His brother-in-law? A pleasure. A 
pleasure. Much obliged to Mr. Sullivan for 
letting him take that telephone call. It was 
pressing business. They had been trying all 
morning to get him on the ’phone. 

In ten minutes the engaging Sullivan had 
moved to the vacant chair opposite Barney, 
had lighted one of his Padages Palmas rather 
gaudily, and was listening to Babbing with a 
flattering admiration showing in his bluish- 
gray eyes. It developed that Sullivan was 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


78 

interested in Cobalt mines, heavily interested; 
in fact, he owned one in partnership with some 
New York mining experts. Being questioned 
by Babbing upon the rating of the Bonanza 
mine in the Beaver district, he remarked that 
it was a hole in the ground, hopeless as an 
investment. It was not a mine at all but 
merely a trap for suckers. Babbing was 
much taken aback. He drank in Sullivan’s 
knowledge and advice greedily — with occa- 
sional hasty gulps of oatmeal porridge and 
noisy draughts of hot coffee; and Barney’s 
innocent hunger and absorbed attention were 
not more childish and convincing than his 
uncle’s. 

Sullivan blossomed and expanded in that 
atmosphere of trust. He and his partners 
were building a hotel for the tourist trade 
near their mine. He had been working on 
the plans for the building. They had discov- 
ered one of the finest, if not the finest spring 
of mineral water on the continent. And so 
forth. 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 79 

He leaned back in his chair, making large 
gestures with his cigar and smiling a broad 
indulgent smile. He flattered Barney. “A 
mighty bright boy, your nephew. A mighty 
bright boy. I ’d hke to have a boy like that 
in my business.” 

“Not much!” Barney said pertly. “I ’m 
goin’ in with uncle.” 

Some of Babbing’s coffee got in his wind- 
pipe at that moment, and he coughed himself 
red in the face. Barney kept a straight 
mouth. 

“I don’t know that you’ll ever be as suc- 
cessful as your uncle,” Sullivan said. “But 
you ’ll succeed. .You ’ve got it in you! lean 
see that.” 

He exacted a promise from Babbing that 
he should go no further in the matter of the 
Bonanza mine until he had come to the office 
of Sullivan’s friends, with Sullivan, to look 
into the “proposition” there. “Excuse me a 
moment,” he said, when Babbing had paid the 
waiter. “I ’ll just run upstairs and get the 


80 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


plans of our hotel. I want to take them with 
me. I ’ll meet you at the desk.” 

He strutted off importantly. Babbing sat 
a moment. “If he brings down his satchel 
with those plans in it,” he said, “you ’ll get it 
to carry. And, at the first opportunity, 
you ’ll cut away with it. Understand? 
Take it to the office. They ’ll have keys to 
open it there. I ’ll get in touch with Chal 
as soon as I can, by ’phone. If he ’s stiU 
carrying his Chicago outfit in that bag, we Ve 
got our case complete. Now, don’t get 
cheeky. If you ’re not careful, you ’ll stub 
your toe!” 


Ill 

A half hour later, a round-faced and sturdy 
youth of sixteen, breathing hard because he 
had been running, sat in a downtown express 
on the Subway, holding a small black hand- 
bag on his knees. He was struggling with a 
dimpled smile that continually escaped con- 
trol and exploded in a snort. The other pas- 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 81 

sengers smiled at him, amusedly. He re- 
treated to the back platform, giggling, and 
grinned at his ease out the door. 

He was still grinning and still breathing 
hard when he entered the Babbing Bureau at 
room 1056, and hurried into Babbing’s pri- 
vate oJffice to find Chal Snider reading a morn- 
ing paper at Babbing’s desk. “Here ’s his 
bag!” 

Snider looked over the top of his newspaper. 
“Whose bag?” 

“Palmer’s.” 

“What!” The cry was not wholly in- 
credulous; it had the quality, too, of envious 
amazement. 

“Sure! Hurry up an’ see what’s in it. 
The Chief wants to know. Hurry up. He ’s 
got him.” 

Snider dropped his paper and grabbed the 
’phone. “Hello? Hello! Bring me in a 
bunch of skeletons for a small satchel. 
Quick.” He caught the bag from Barney. 
“Well, I ’ll be switched. How the hell?” 


82 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Barney wiped the perspiration of haste 
from his forehead with his coat cuff. “We 
roped him at the Beaumont. He ’d been 
buyin’ them long cigars.” 

“Well, the old devil!” He sat with the 
satchel on his lap, expressing a profane ad- 
miration to it in a sort of dumbfounded under- 
tone. “The damn old fox! How did he 
think of thatr 

“Search meT Barney grinned. 

A clerk came in with the keys. Snider had 
the bag opened in a jiffy. He dumped its 
contents on the desk — blue-prints, catalogues, 
a scratch block, loose sheets of memoranda, an 
assortment of blank checks, and a roll of 
money in a rubber band. “The old man’s 

wad!” Snider exulted. “By G he’s got 

the swag back too! Where is he?” 

“He ’s off with Palmer. He ’s goin’ to 
’phone you. He tol’ me to grab the bag an’ 
beat it. That boob was tryin’ to sell him stock 
in some fake hotel he ’s buildin’ some’rs, when 
I dropped off.” 


The old man’s wad!” Snider exulted. “By 0 he's "ot the swa^- hack too! 




I 










CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 85 

Snider went through the swindler’s papers 
with appropriate remarks, and then began 
thoughtfully to pack them back in the bag. 
“Where did you go from here?” 

Barney told the story in an excited in- 
coherency. Snider nodded and nodded. 
“He’s slick!” he commented primly, again 
and again. “He ’s pretty damn slick!” 

“Well, how did he know the guy was at the 
Beaumont?” Barney asked. 

“He did n’t know. He took a chance. He 
figured that Palmer would n’t go far from the 
depot in the rain. Didn’t you hear him say 
it was raining hard last night at eight-thirty? 
He just played a hunch and got away with 
it.” 

“What’s he goin’ to do next?” Barney de- 
manded in the delighted impatience of youth 
to know the end of the story. 

The ringing of the telephone bell inter- 
rupted them with what proved to be the an- 
swer. “Hello?” Snider said. “Yes, Chief. 
Yes. His whole outfit ’s in it. And four 


86 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


thousand of the old man’s money. Yes. 
Yes.” He tittered. He shook over the 
’phone silently. “Ye-e-s. I ’ll ha-ave them.” 
And he dropped the receiver into its hook and 
lay back in his chair in a grimacing sputter of 
fat laughter. “He ’s bringing him hee-here. 
He ’s pretending he thinks you-you ’ve been 
ki-ki-kidnapped. Hee-hee-hee !” He wiped 
his wet eyes helplessly. “Palmer won’t let 
him go to the police station. They ’re 
co-coming here to get us out to find you.” 
He jumped up, suddenly, and slapped him- 
self on top of the head with a comical gesture. 
“I ’ve got to get papers for him. Put Archi- 
bald wise to what ’s coming.” He darted out 
the door with unexpected agility, and Barney 
hastened to find Archibald. 

Either Archibald had no sense of humor or 
it was inhibited by a stronger sense of dignity. 
Barney’s story provoked no smile from him. 
“Wait in the operatives’ room,” he said drily. 
“If we need you, we ’ll call you. Leave the 
bag here.” 


CASE OF PAD AGES PALMER 87 

The operatives’ room was a large inner 
office fitted up with desks that showed inky 
evidences of long use, typewriters that rattled 
loosely, and battered fifing cabinets. Two 
men were getting out reports on their type- 
writers; a third was searching the pages of a 
telephone directory, page after page, slowly, 
as if he had been at it for hours and expected 
to continue it for hours. Barney sat down in 
a corner and waited. No call came for him. 
He imagined the scene between Archibald, 
Babbing and Mr. Thomas Sullivan, when they 
should put the swindled swindler under arrest ; 
but he had to take it out in imagining. The 
operatives came and went as busily as report- 
ers turning in their copy, but no one spoke to 
him. 

And Barney became vaguely aware of one 
fact about the fife of detectives for which fic- 
tion had not prepared him. Like the private 
soldier in a campaign, the operative of a de- 
tective bureau obeys orders without knowing 
the reason for them and executes commands 


88 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


without seeing their results. He participates 
in events of which he does not always under- 
stand the beginning and sometimes never 
learns the end. He comes in for a single 
scene in one drama, and leaves it to play an 
equally brief part in another. Barney was 
no longer needed in the affair of Charles Q. 
Palmer, and he was not invited to watch the 
swindler’s astonishment when his bag was 
produced as evidence against him and the 
police arrived with the warrant for his ar- 
rest. 

It was nearly midday when Babbing ap- 
peared, and Barney stood up smiling to greet 
him. 

“Go home and tell your mother what 
you ’re doing,” Babbing said. “And tell her 
to keep it to herself. I want you to come to 
Philadelphia with me to-night. Get your- 
self a suit-case. And bring a suit of old 
clothes — the shabbiest you ’ve got. . , . Here, 
Clark!” he called. “Show this boy how to 
make out a requisition for expense money. 


CASE OF PADAGES PALMER 89 


He ’ll need twenty-five or thirty dollars. Be 
back here at four o’clock.” 

‘‘Yes, sir.” Barney hesitated. “Did you 
get him?” 

“Who? Palmer? Oh, yes. Yes. He’s 
held for return to Chicago. Run along now. 
Be here sharp at four, with your bag packed. 
And tell your mother not to mark your linen — 
except with your initials. Understand?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

Babbing regarded him whimsically. “How 
do you like being a detective?” 

“Oh, gee!” Barney grinned. “It’s great. 
Chief.” 

Babbing gave him a parting pat on the 
shoulder. “All right, boy,” he said. “I ’m 
glad you like it.” And Barney did not im- 
derstand why his tone of voice was deprecia- 
tive! 


Ill 


THOUGH MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 

1 

T O the other passengers in the Pullman 
car, the pair in section 7 were a pros- 
perous business man of a rotund middle age, 
who was sedately absorbed in his afternoon 
papers, and a healthy youngster in his later 
’teens who watched the window fascinatedly. 
The man had an air of unworried well-being; 
he read as if he were contented with the world 
and tolerant of its doings, as these appeared 
in print; and when, in turning the paper, he 
glanced at the boy, he showed an appraising 
eye of interest in that silent young alertness 
that did not irritate with questions. The boy 
remained oblivious. The Hudson River was 
making a moving picture of itself in the frame 

90 




MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 91 

of the car window, for his benefit — swaying 
and flickering as it unrolled on a sun-dazzled 
film — and he and the other passengers might 
have been sitting in the darkness of orchestra 
chairs, for all he saw of them. 

The man was Walter Babbing. The boy was 
Barney Cook. They were supposed to be on 
their way to Philadelphia, to work on a case. 
And Babbing was waiting to see how long it 
would take young Barney to remember that 
the road to Philadelphia did not lead up the 
west bank of the Hudson River. 

Hence his appraising glances. Hence, 
also, the questions that he began to ask, from 
behind his paper, every now and then, as he 
turned from one news item to the next: 
“Were you ever in Philadelphia?” “How far 
have you been from New York?” “Where 
is Philadelphia?” “Well, in what direction 
do you think it is, from New York?” And to 
these queries, Barney had to answer that he 
had never been in Philadelphia, that he had 
never been farther from New York than 


92 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Coney Island, that he did not know where 
Philadelphia was, nor in what direction it lay, 
nor how long it would take to get there. He 
admitted his ignorance reluctantly — to the 
back sheet of the newspaper which Babbing^^ 
continued to read — but he admitted it. He 
had too much respect for Babbing’s penetra- 
tion to attempt to tell him anything but the 
truth. 

If he had told the whole truth, he would 
have confessed that Philadelphia was not a 
city to him at all, but a baseball team. 

Babbing put aside his paper. ‘‘You’re a 
real New Yorker,” he concluded, with sar- 
casm. He opened his satchel on the seat be- 
side him, took a book from it, and settled down 
again to read. Barney returned his eyes to 
the window, smiling doubtfully. 

He did not notice Babbing’s book. Yet he 
might well have done so. It was a curious 
book for a detective to be reading — a sort of 
boudoir volume of Elizabethan poetry, bound 
in white vellum elaborately tooled in gold leaf. 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 93 


It was called “The Queen’s Choir,” and the 
poem to which he first applied himself was in 
the middle of the book: “A Fiction: How 
Cupid made a Nymph wound herself with his 
Arrows.” In the last stanza, there was a 
couplet that read: 

Though mountains meet not, lovers may; 

So others do, and so do they. 

And the first line of the couplet was heavily 
underscored. 

Babbing regarded that line with satisfaction 
before he went back to the blank fiy leaves and 
began to examine page after page with leis- 
urely particularity. “Have you ever heard of 
the Catskills?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

He passed several pages before he asked: 
“What are they?” 

Barney looked out the window as if he ex- 
pected to see them floating down the Hudson 
on a Haverstraw brick barge. “I don’ know,” 
he replied, at last. “I forget.” 


94 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘‘They ’re mountains,” Babbing said. 
“And we ’re going there.” 

Barney glanced furtively out the window 
again, to make sure that he had not overlooked 
them. He knew what mountains were. He 
had seen pictures of them. There were none 
in sight. “Yes, sir,” he said. 

Babbing brushed the newspapers from the 
seat beside him and put his satchel on the floor. 
“Sit over here, and I ’ll tell you what I want 
you to do.” 

Barney obeyed him, eager, interested, im- 
portant. He forgot the window as com- 
pletely as if it had been a childish toy, and 
his face became grave with an elderly atten- 
tion, large-eyed. 

Babbing continued to occupy himself with 
his book. “We have a case against a man 
named Langton,” he said as he scrutinized and 
turned the pages. “William K. Langton. 
For wrecking a trust company that he was 
president of. He’s out on bail. We can’t 
complete our case against him without the evi- 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 95 
idence of the treasurer of the company — a 
young fellow — James Whately. James 
Parkin Whately. Whately has disappeared. 
He ’s keeping out of the way, so as to protect 
old Langton. 

“He ’s engaged to Langton’s daughter, 
Mary. Mary Langton. 

“I don’t think he ’s guiltily involved, but 
we ’ve got a warrant for him, on indictment, 
so as to hold him if we can find him. That ’s 
why the newspapers suppose he defaulted.” 

He paused a moment on the book. He 
continued, drily: “The Langtons have a 
house on Forty-fifth Street. One of their 
servants has been on our payroll ever since we 
started on the case. We ’ve been watching 
the daughter to see if we could connect her 
with Whately, and find out where he is. Yes- 
terday, she disappeared. We learned that she 
received this volume of poetry by book-post 
before she went, but we weren’t able to get 
the postmark. She had destroyed the 
wrapper. My theory is that it came from 


96 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


"Whately. There’s a line in it that reads 
like an invitation to meet him in the moun- 
tains. 

“Her father has Keen a great fellow for 
fishing — trout fishing. We found that he 
owns a neck of the woods up here, with a trout 
stream — and a bungalow on the moun- 
tain overlooking a place called Careyville. 
Two of our boys have just reported, 
from Careyville, that Mary Langton ’s in that 
bungalow, with an old woman, a servant 
who ’s been in the family for years. 

“The girl drew all her money out of her 
private account before she left. My theory 
is that she ’s going to persuade Whately to 
get away where we can’t find him, and she 
intends to use the money to help him do it. 
We haven’t much time to lose. She prob- 
ably knows that we ’ve been watching her*. 
She won’t want to have any delay. But he 
knows that we haven’t been able to get on 
his trail. He ’ll feel more confident than she 
does. And unless she intends to go with him. 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 97 

she ’ll have difBculty persuading him to start. 
Understand?” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney answered. 

“Well, that ’s our opportunity.” He said 
it as coolly as if he were a bird hunter watch- 
ing a nest of young to which he knew the 
frightened mother would return — to be shot. 

“The boys up at Careyville report that they 
can’t get near the Langton bungalow with- 
out rousing suspicion. We have to be care- 
ful. We can’t cover the woods. Whately 
could travel for days in any one of a half- 
dozen different directions without showing 
himself. And he knows how to do it. He 
has hunted all through these hills. If we ’re 
to catch him, we ’ll have to do it before either 
he or the girl suspects that we ’re even look- 
ing for him up here. 

“That ’s where you come in. You ’ve got 
to get into the Langton bungalow and watch 
her. He ’s probably hiding somewhere near. 
The boys at Careyville can see the house with 
field glasses, and they report that no man has 


98 


DETECTIVE BARNEY 


shown himself yet. He may come out at 
night. Or she may go to see him, .That ’s 
what you Ve got to find out. 

‘‘We ’ll arrange a system of signals, so that 
you can summon us as soon as you locate him. 
The boys are to meet us, with an auto, at 
Beaverton — the station this side of the one 
where passengers get out for Careyville. 
We ’ll make the arrangements with them, for 
your signals, so as to be sure they ’ll be prac- 
ticable. And we ’ll take you in the auto up 
the road as far as we dare go towards the 
bungalow, and drop you. We ’ll go on to 
Careyville in the machine. Then, to-morrow 
morning, you ’ll have to talk your way into 
the girl ’s confidence, some way or other. 
Have you brought those old clothes with 
you?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Well, you can put them on in the auto. 
I ’ll lay out a story for you as soon as we see 
the boys. I don’t know the locality. We ’ll 
have to have something about getting lost in 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 99 

the woods, I suppose. We’ll decide that 
later. Did you ever hear of Sir Walter 
Raleigh?” 

Barney shook his head. “No, sir.” 

“He ’s the scoundrel that started you smok- 
ing cigarettes. Here ’s his picture. That ’s 
what tobacco does to a man.” 

He gave Barney “The Queen’s Choir” 
opened at a picture of Raleigh wearing a 
corseted doublet, a fluted ruff, a sash that was 
tied on his shoulder in a puffy bow as big as 
his head, a hat with feminine feathers in it, 
and lace falls on his wrists. “Geel” Barney 
said. “Was he bug?” 

Babbing laughed. “Sit over there and 
amuse yourself. I have to go through these 
reports. See if you can think of some way 
of talking yourself into the Langtons’ bunga- 
low.” 

Barney glanced at the book. It opened 
naturally at the marked page — ^because Mary 
Langton, crying over that passage, had 
hugged it hysterically to her bosom and 


100 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


broken the binding. Barney saw no sugges- 
tion of her there. The underscored line 
seemed merely silly. “Though mountains 
meet not, lovers may!” Pickles! 

For him, all books were divided into three 
classes: school books, religious books, and 
books to read. “The Queen’s Choir” was 
evidently a hybrid of the first and second, 
combining the offensiveness of both. The 
pictures told no story, and therefore, prob- 
ably, they were intended to be instructive; 
the binding was fit only for a First Com- 
munion souvenir; the contents were merely 
verse. In school, he had been made to com- 
mit poems to memory from the pages of his 
reader, and he supposed that all verses were 
rhymed to make them more easily remem- 
bered. He knew that they were always 
nauseatingly moral and hence supposed to 
be medicinal. Out of school, he would no 
more read them than he would order a drink 
of castor oil at a soda fountain. 

He dropped “The Queen’s Choir” and gave 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 101 

his mind to thoughts of the Langton bunga- 
low. He was not sure what a bungalow was, 
but among his mother’s china were some cheap 
modem imitations of old willow-pattern 
plates in blue ; and his sister had once told him 
the nursery story of the Chinese lovers whose 
history was pictured in the design; and he 
recalled the house in her story as a bungalow. 
Consequently, he saw the Langton cottage in 
Prussian blue with scroll-work eaves and a 
pagoda’s finials. Consequently, also, the 
Langton trout stream was as broad as the 
Chinese river, and it floated a junk with a 
shed in its stern. 

He struggled vaguely with the absurdities 
of this fancy, but without succeeding in cor- 
recting them. The sight of the Hudson 
River distracted him. After a great deal of 
kaleidoscopic meditation, he arrived at noth- 
ing better than a picture of himself, disguised 
in his former uniform of a telegraph mes- 
senger, climbing over a zigzag fence of 
Chinese lattice to deliver a forged telegram to 


102 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Mary Langton. He was neither worried nor 
unpleasantly excited by the uncertainty of his 
expectation. He waited to hear Babbing’s 
plans and follow his instructions, confidently. 

When they arrived at Middletown, Bab- 
bing said: “There isn’t any dining-car on. 
I ’m going out to get something to eat. You 
stay where you are.” He added, in explana- 
tion: “You’ll have to be hungry when you 
get to Langtons’.” And Barney understood 
that the plan of campaign was being prepared 
and his part in it decided on. 

He sat back in his seat and dutifully began 
to nurse his hunger. 

It was dark when they arrived at Beaver- 
ton and came out of the heat and glare of the 
Pullman into the coolness of a mountain night 
and the moist gusts of a wind that threatened 
rain. They were met at the car steps by an 
operative who took Babbing’s handbag with- 
out a word and led the way to a waiting auto- 
mobile — a covered touring car that throbbed 
with an impatient engine, its lights glaring on 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 103 

the ruts and dust flurries of a macadam road. 
The driver was putting on storm curtains. 
“Rain coming, Sam?” Babbing asked, as he 
passed Barney into the tonneau. 

“Sure ’s you live, Chief,” the driver an- 
swered, busily. 

“Good! That’ll help,” Babbing said. 

His operative followed him in. The driver 
fastened down the curtains. Babbing drew 
out a little electric pocket-lamp and flashed 
it on Barney’s suit-case. “Get into your old 
clothes,” he ordered the boy. “We ’ll sit 
here.” 

He gave Barney the big rear seat, with his 
suit-case. “Let me see your road map,” he 
said to his operative. “This is Barney Cook. 
We want to get as near as we can to the Lang- 
ton bungalow — ^without leaving the main 
road — and then drop him out, to do the rop- 
ing. I ’ll stay in Careyville with you. He ’s 
to give us the signal as soon as he locates 
young Whately. Give me the lay of the land, 
will you? There ’s the rain.” 


104 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

A few scattered drops began to patter on 
the hood. “You’ll get wet enough to show 
you ’ve been out all night, anyway,” he said 
to Barney, and spread the map on his knees. 

Barney was peeling off his clothes. “I can 
swim,” he volunteered pertly, “if I don’t get 
cramps.” 

Babbing nudged his operative with a secret 
elbow. They had their heads together over 
the map. “Here ’s our road, now,” Babbing 
said. “Where does Langton’s property be- 
gin?” 


II 

The highway from the Beaverton station 
ran for five miles up a tilted valley to the top 
of a ridge of rolling land whose slopes had 
been cleared for farms. Where the ridge 
joined the shoulder of Knob Top, the road be- 
gan to wind down to the Careyville valley, 
in falling turns and angles; and, at the first 
turn, a narrower road forked off, into the 
woods of Knob Top, to find the Langton 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 105 


bungalow where it sat high above Careyville 
with its back to the mountain. 

At the entrance to this wood-road, the auto 
slowed in a sightless downpour, blinded by- 
lightning, deafened by a thunder that shook 
the hills, struggling against a stampede of 
wind and rain that had gone wild with the 
night. A hand raised the storm curtains; 
the door opened; Barney jumped out; and the 
cold rain doused him dripping wet in an in- 
stant, as if buckets had been emptied on him. 
He hunched up his shoulders, pulling down 
his hat, and he ran for the shelter of the trees, 
crouching. A bright explosion of lightning 
that burst the sky showed a blanched world 
of rock and field in gray greens, the woods 
before him lashed and reeling, the road ankle- 
deep in a muddy torrent. It was all blotted out 
instantly in a roar of thunder. When the 
next stab of lightning cut the darkness, the 
auto had vanished down the mountain-side and 
Barney was hidden by the woods. 

He had run to them as instinctively as he 


106 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

would have taken shelter in a doorway from 
a city downpour, but it was no comfortable 
doorway that he found. The rain was drum- 
ming on the leaves in a confused uproar; the 
branches were tossing, the trees creaking; and 
the water poured down on him in broken 
streams. A blaze of lightning lit up the 
green depths around him with an unearthly 
cold incandescence. He saw a wide perspec- 
tive of black tree trunks, overhung with 
threshing branches and fluttering leaves trans- 
parently green — a confusion of frightened 
underbrush, dripping rocks, ferns tremulously 
swaying — and the ruts and stones and ditch 
gullies of a road that was arched with tree 
limbs and drenched foliage like an arbor. 

It all glowed vitreously bright for one 
blinking instant, and then darkness snatched 
it away; the thunder crashed and rever- 
berated as if he were in a cave that split and 
rocked around him ; a new fury of rain rushed 
through the tree tops with a hissing rage; a 
wet leaf slapped him smartly across his cheek 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 107 

and ear. He started and struck at it, and 
shook it from his fingers, and stood trembling. 

There was no slum or dive in New York 
City where Barney would have been afraid — 
for there was no human being, from the 
policeman on the beat to the gangster in the 
cellar, whom he would not have known how 
to wheedle with his frank eyes and his inno- 
cent smile. But the woods were new to him. 
His feet, used to pavements, were nervous 
in the yielding mud that seemed treacherous 
and slimy. Everything about him was un- 
stable, disordered, bewilderingly agitated; he 
had a feeling that it would all be squashy to 
the touch; and he apprehended that it con- 
cealed snakes and rat-like animals that might 
scuttle over his feet. He had been assured 
that there were no bears, or such, ‘'nearer than 
the Central Park menagerie.” 

Babbing and the men in the auto had torn 
the band from his hat and stained the light 
felt with spots of oil, artistically. They had 
pried the heel off one of his shoes and split the 


108 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
other at the bend of the toe. They had 
broken apart a pair of handcuffs, snapped one 
on his left wrist, and fastened his shirt cuff 
over it to conceal it and its dangling chain 
links. As a further disguise of guilt, they 
had made a sling for his left arm out of a 
handkerchief, and buttoned his coat over the 
bandage. And all the time that they had 
been thus making him up as a fugitive from 
justice, they had been coaching him in the 
story that he was to tell in the Langton bunga- 
low when he should come upon it in the morn- 
ing, after a night spent in the woods. 

“Gather all the mud and scratches you can, 
now,’’ Babbing counseled finally. “And 
don’t forget to be hungry, I don’t suppose 
you ’ll be able to look thirsty if this storm 
keeps up. Go ahead.” 

Barney had gone ahead, his mind fixed on 
the moment of his arrival at Langton’s door. 
He had overlooked the interval that must 
elapse. And when the touch of the wet leaf 
startled him, he was standing shivering in the 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 109 


mud and water, facing the impossible pros- 
pect of a whole night spent in this storm-mad 
wilderness. 

He began to move forward nervously up 
the road, with a vague idea that he might find 
some sort of shelter; but the darkness was so 
intimidating that after a few hesitating steps 
he stopped again and waited for the lightning. 
It showed him the road rising before him in 
a long uneven slant. He began to hurry, 
tripping over stones and floundering into ruts 
and puddles. In the black tumult of the rain, 
the woods seemed to be rushing past on both 
sides of him; they halted, when it lightened, 
cowering ; but when the darkness and the thun- 
der leaped on them, they started off again in a 
panic. 

Soon the panic was in Barney’s legs. He 
had forgotten the loss of his boot heel, and 
the road seemed to rock under his uneven 
steps. A tree fell with a splitting crash of 
branches somewhere near him, and he leaped 
to escape it. His heart stampeded him. He 


110 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


ran blindly, fell on his elbows, scrambled up 
and stumbled into some bushes, and fought 
his way through them. An arm caught him 
across the chest and held him; and when the 
lightning flared again, he found himself strug- 
gling with a sapling. He clung to it, out of 
breath and bareheaded, with the rain trickling 
down the mud on his face. 

He stayed there till he had regained con- 
trol of himself. He found his hat. He fum- 
bled his way back to the road and began to 
move up it again. He was careful, deliber- 
ate, apparently composed. But his nerve 
was gone, and he knew it. He knew that he 
had to be cautious with himself. He was 
trembling internally, and his legs jerked. 
The lightning and the thunder struck and 
vibrated in him as if he had been jarred loose 
inside. He had to stifle an impulse lifting 
him to yell and run back, with the wind, a 
part of the uproar, blown along with the 
rain. 

The lightning disclosed a tall hemlock by 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 111 


the road-side, with branches like great fronds 
that looked as if they would shelter him. He 
felt his way to it through the brush in the 
ditch, and stood there hesitating. Its trunk 
was wet, its roots in a sodden moss; and al- 
though he was already as wet as the moss was, 
he goose-fleshed at the thought of sitting 
down in it. 

He wondered what he was going to do — how 
he was to spend the night. 

He wanted to And a cave and crawl 
into it, away from all this intolerable noise 
and discomfort — a deep, dry cave, dark and 
still. 

And then the lightning burst in the tree- 
top over his head. The bark of the hemlock 
under his hand exploded like a shell. He was 
thrown into the ditch and he sprang to his 
feet and ran with his mouth open, panting out 
a hoarse whisper that he thought was shrill, 
bounding along in great leaps, without falling, 
without leaving the road, with a curious sen- 
sation as if the lower part of him were a run- 


112 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

away horse that carried him clinging to it. 
And he ran up the road, instead of down. 
And the storm hooted and whipped him. But 
over all his panic and the incredible swift- 
ness of the motion that bore him along, his 
mind seemed to ride coolly alert and exultant 
and at the same time mad. 

He fell and struck his forehead against 
something immovable from which his head 
seemed to rebound with a swimming lightness 
that was exhilarating; his amazing body lifted 
him again imhurt, and sprang ahead with 
him. It carried him without effort, and fell 
and rose under him, dipping and soaring like 
a bird. Once the lightning showed a fallen 
tree-trunk in his way, and he leaped with the 
flash, and cleared it, and sailed along un- 
wearied. He felt that he would never tire, 
and when he began to sink in on himself, it was 
as if his body were a punctured balloon that 
had begun to flatten but not to collapse. 

His feet seemed to be dragging. He 
feared that they might catch against some- 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 118 


thing and bring down his head, which still 
floated. When another arm caught him 
across his chest, he hung on it weakly and let 
the world blow by, happily anchored in a 
surge that rose and fell with him, his eyes on 
a shore light that burned steadily on the 
horizon. 

He had struck against a pole gate, and the 
lightning revealed a clearing in the woods and 
a house beyond it. He hung there a long 
time, watching it come and go in flashes, and 
he had not the slightest idea why it disap- 
peared, any more than if the whole thing were 
a night-mare. First there would be the dark- 
ness with the small ray of yellow light in it; 
then the open field and the house, as distinct 
as daylight; then the darkness again — over 
and over, in a dizzy, drunken sort of blinking 
iteration. He felt seasick. 

It occurred to him that he might crawl 
through the gate and sneak up and grab a 
pillar of the veranda when it rose to show 
itself, and clamber aboard it. If he made no 


114 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


noise, the crew would not come out and throw 
him off into the water again. He could sleep 
there comfortably. He needed sleep. 

He got the upper part of his body through 
the gate, between the poles, without much 
difficulty, but his legs hung back and impeded 
him; and when he began to crawl along the 
road, watching cunningly for the reappear- 
ance of the house, he found that his knees were 
unwilling to help him. Under these condi- 
tions his progress was necessarily slow. Be- 
sides, the house seldom reappeared in the 
place where it had vanished. It kept moving 
all around the horizon. He discovered that 
it followed the yellow light — that if he could 
hold this steady with his eyes, he could control 
the house. Then he began to gain on it. He 
was swimming “dog fashion,” of course. On 
account of the weight of his legs he had all he 
could do to keep his chin above water, and the 
spray splashed in his eyes. 

When he got hold of the veranda steps, he 
clung there, floating. He was unable to drag 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 115 


himself out. Several times, when he was al- 
most up, his knee slipped and he fell back 
again; but he never lost his grip. He con- 
cluded that he would have to raise himself by 
the shoulders alone, independent of his legs; 
and he came up the steps on his belly, holding 
to the edge of one step with his chin while he 
got his hands on the next one. He was mak- 
ing more noise than he had expected, and he 
was admonishing himself to be quiet, in a 
panting mumble, when the door was suddenly 
thrown open, and a woman stood in the light. 
He lay perfectly still and watched her, his 
chin on the edge of the veranda floor. 

He w^as an incredible, a shocking sight. 
He had cut his forehead, and the blood was 
over his face. One eye was almost closed in 
a bruise; the other wavered like a drunken 
man’s. He was plastered with mud to the 
hair. His coat was torn from his shoulder. 
His mouth was open, and his breath came in 
hoarse gasps. 

The woman screamed “My Godl” and 


116 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

backed into the room. ‘Tt ’s a murdered 
man!” she cried, there. “He’s dyin’! He’s 
dyin’ on the doorstep!” 

A younger woman put her aside swiftly 
and came out with a lamp. The grimace that 
Barney made was an attempt to smile at her. 
He raised himself slowly on his hands, and 
his head nodded and swayed. He saw her at 
a great distance, very small, in a little circle 
of light that gradually closed in upon her till 
she and the light vanished. 

When she put her lamp down on the porch 
table and turned to help him, she found that 
he had fainted. 

He regained consciousness lying on his back, 
looking up at the dark beams and lemon-yel- 
low plaster of a living-room ceiling. The 
head of a young woman came between him 
and the beams, and her eyes were very large 
and brown. He saw them disassociated 
from all else, moving with an independent in- 
telligence of their own, between long lashes, 
under dark eyebrows. A warm, wet cloth 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 117 

shut off his puzzled scrutiny by applying itself 
to his forehead. 

When the cloth withdrew, she put an arm 
gently under his neck and shoulders and 
raised him. She was on one knee, on the 
floor beside him, and she propped him with 
the other knee while she took a steaming glass 
from somewhere behind her, and held it to 
his lips. He drank with his eyes on her hand. 
The smooth plump delicacy of her fingers in- 
terested him. He put his own muddy paw 
up to regulate the flow of the choking liquor, 
and felt the softness of her flesh. He looked 
up at her. She smiled at him, without mov- 
ing to free her hand. “Better?” she asked. 

He regarded her smile with an impersonal 
interest. It was a very pleasant, slow smile. 
He looked into her eyes, and was fascinated. 
She asked: “What is your name?” 

He answered, after a moment, as if he were 
in doubt: “Barney. Barney . . . Cook.” 

“Where do you live?” 

“N’ York.” 


118 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“How did you come hereV 

Evidently, he could not remember. 

“Take the glass, Annie,” she said. 

Some one took the glass. In order to move 
him she freed her fingers from his, slipping 
her hand down his wrist. It was his left wrist, 
and she touched the metal there. “What ’s 
that?” His head came over on her bosom as 
she shifted him. “Annie!” She raised his 
hand. “Annie!” 

Another voice said, in a whisper: “It’s 
the police! It ’s a handcuff!” 

The liquor had made him drowsy, and her 
breast was a soft pillow. In their horrified 
silence he rested weakly, his head swimming in 
pain. Somewhere he heard a mufiled thump- 
ing. That was her heart. 

The voices went on: “They ’ll be after ’m.” 
“Lock the door. Draw the curtains.” 
“Will yuh keep him — hereT “I — I don’t 
know.” Footsteps were busy about him. 

She whispered, close: “What have you 
done? Boy?” When he did not answer, she 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 119 
lowered him into her lap and roused him, one 
arm about him, a hand laid on his cheek. 
“Tell me. What has happened?” He 
studied the concern in her eyes. “The hand- 
cuff,” she said. She raised his wrist to show 
it to him. “Who did that?” 

He groped in the misty blankness of his 
brain. He frowned, and found the seat of 
pain in his forehead. She asked. “Were you 
arrested?” 

He said, at last, faintly; “Yes.” 

“For what? What had you done?” 

He could not remember. He remembered 
that — that some one had told him — something. 
“I jumped,” he said. “I jumped off the 
train.” 

“Why? . . . Why did you jump from a 
train?” 

He raised himself a little and put a hand to 
his forehead. His head felt huge. “What ’s 
the matter with it?” he complained. 

“You Ve hurt yourself— when you jumped, 
perhaps.” 


120 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“Geer 

“How did you get up here?” 

“I — I don’ know. I was in the woods. 
Runnin’. I — I guess I was scared.” He 
saw the room, in the rich lamplight. “Where 
am I?” 

“You ’re safe,” she said, deeply. “Don’t 
be afraid.” 

“I ’m wet, ain’t I ? ... I was swimmin’ 
. . . That’s how I got here.” And then, 
after long thought, he added: “Gee, I’m 
mixed.” 

He felt her shaking. It was in the hyster- 
ical relief of nervous laughter. He smiled up 
at her, with the wreck of his engaging grin. 
He said: “I ’m — I ’m glad I ’m here, any- 
way. . . . Where am I?” 

She regained her gravity. “My name is 
Langton — Mary Langton. This is my 
father’s house.” 

“Langton?” He had heard the name be- 
fore. He could not remember where, and the 
pain dulled his effort to recollect. “I ’m on 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 121 

the blink,” he sighed, and sank back in her 
arms again, drowsily. 

‘‘Help me put him on the couch, Annie,” 
she said. 

The rest was between waking and sleeping. 
They carried him to a roomy leather couch be- 
side the fire-place, and made him comfortable 
with cushions, and bandaged his head, and 
took off his wet clothing, and wrapped him 
in warm blankets. He was fast asleep when 
they were pulling off his shoes. He was big 
for his age, but his mouth pouted in his dreams 
like a child’s; and Mary Langton, flushing a 
little, bent over him maternally as she tucked 
the blanket under his bare, boyish shoulders, 
and her hand lingered in a comforting touch 
of pity on his round young neck. 

Ill 

There were three to sit down for breakfast 
in the Langton bungalow, next morning; and 
one of them was Barney with a clean bandage 
fastened diagonally over his forehead and his 


122 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


bruised eye. He had regained his color and 
his smile, which beamed — ^with some doubtful 
intervals — on Mary Langton. She was wear- 
ing a lace cap and negligee, enchantingly 
adorned with old rose ribbons; and she re- 
plied to Barney’s smile with one of a protect- 
ing benevolence that remembered putting him 
to bed. 

The third at the table was an athletic-look- 
ing young man in a shooting costume, whom 
Barney had recognized as the missing Whately 
in spite of his new mustache that continually 
attracted his fingers. Hat in hand, he had 
wakened Barney in a bedroom upstairs, 
where Barney had been as much surprised to 
find himself as to see Whately; but no ques- 
tions had been asked on either side. He had 
brought Barney some underclothes and a 
dressing gown that were too large for him. 
“Your own things are still drying in the 
kitchen,” he said. “Breakfast ’s ready.” 

It was he who bandaged Barney’s wounds, 
amused by the boy’s blinking and troubled si- 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 123 


lence. “We ’ll have to get that off with a 
file,” he remarked of Barney’s handcuff, as 
he helped to roll up the sleeves of the dressing 
gown. He brought a pair of bath slippers. 
“That ’s the best we can do.” 

Barney said nothing. His mind was as 
busy as a hive of bees, and the swarming ac- 
tivity of his thoughts showed in his face. 
Whately was enjoying his own superiority in 
deception; he talked with an easy naturalness, 
smiling inwardly at Barney’s bewilderment. 
He could imagine what the hoy was thinking. 
“Ready?” he asked, when Barney was washed 
and dressed and bandaged. 

Barney nodded. “I guess I was struck by 
lightnin’,” he volunteered. 

“Were you?” Whately replied cheerfully. 
“Tell us about it downstairs. Aren’t you 
hungry?” 

“Gee!” Barney sighed. “Hungry!” 

“Come along then.” 

They came downstairs to the living room to- 
gether, and Mary Langton included them both 


124 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

in her affectionate air of greeting. She put 
one hand on Barney’s shoulder, as she led 
him to the table, patting him as if he were a 
child. He was a child, forthwith. Instinc- 
tively, quite without craft, and almost uncon- 
scious of the fact that he was acting a part, 
he became an ingenuous youngster without 
a trace of guile. 

Whately did not notice the change at first; 
for Mary, as they crossed the room, secretly 
found his hand and spoke to it in a dumb 
pressure that was eloquent: it took all his mind 
to her, warmly. 

“Did you sleep well?” she asked Barney. 

“I don’t remember,” he said — and joined 
in their amusement, naively unabashed. 

He stared around at the room like an in- 
terested infant. It was a sort of room that 
he had never seen before — ^with silvery gray 
woodwork and yellow sash-curtains, silk rugs 
and a hardwood floor, a bear skin before a 
huge fireplace, a cottage piano, furniture of 
severe oak upholstered in Spanish leather. 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 125 

books and flowers. It was an immense room, 
full of sunlight and color; and the table was 
set at one end in an alcove of windows that 
looked out on the valley far below. The sight 
of the fruit piled in a great wicker tray in the 
center of the table took his eyes and held them. 
‘T have n’t had anything to eat since — ” It 
seemed ages — “since I don’t know when.” 

“Help yourself, Barney,” she said, as they 
sat down. “To the fruit. And tell us how 
you got here.” 

He reached an orange, bit a wound in it — 
transparently embarrassed — and began to 
skin it with his fingers. “He — he lef’ me on 
the train,” he said, “fer a minute, an’ I jumped 
’n — ’n’ beat it — ’n’ piked up the road — till I 
got here.” 

''Who left you on the train?” Whately 
asked. 

He looked up furtively at old Annie, who 
was bringing in the coffee. “The detective,” 
he said. 

“What did the detective want you for?” 


126 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘‘Nothin’. I — It was my brother done 
it, ’n’ — ’n’ they got hirrij hut I got away — t’ 
Oswego. ’N I wrote home to my mother. 
’N I guess that ’s how they foun’ out where I 
was.” 

“And you had n’t done anything wrong, at 
all, had you, Barney?” she asked. 

Barney gave her the gaze of utter inno- 
cence. “No ’m.” 

Whately eyed him. This was not the trou- 
bled, silent face that he had watched upstairs. 
“How did you get the other handcuff off?” 

Barney had filled his mouth with orange. 
He shook his head and gulped everything. 
“They don’t put ’em onto both yer hands. 
He puts one onto your wrist an’ one onto 
his. He took his off, when he lef’ me in the 
car fer a minute — ’n’ I broke it off the chain 
with a couple o’ stones — after I got away.” 

“Don’t bother him now, dear,” she said, 
faintly. “He ’s hungry.” 

Whately saw her pale look of distress. 
“What ’s the matter?” 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 127 

‘T don’t like to hear of — ^handcuffs,” she 
said. 

‘‘Oh!” 

And Barney understood. For the first 
time, he realized what he was going to do to 
her when he gave the signal to Careyville that 
Whately was in the bungalow. He devoted 
himself to his breakfast silently. He did not 
care about Whately; that fellow thought him- 
self too smart, anyway. But she — 

He looked aside, out the window, and saw 
the white frame houses of the village among 
the trees in the valley. “That ’s Careyville,” 
she explained. 

“Who lives in the big house? The one with 
the peak in the middle?” 

“It ’s the summer hotel.” 

He had guessed as much. He could see 
the window, in that central gable, behind which 
an operative sat with field glasses, watching 
the bungalow. He returned to his plate. 

Whately asked: “Where are you going, 
from here?” 


128 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘Tt does n’t cut much ice where I go,” Bar- 
ney answered. “They ’ll get me.” 

^^Please don’t,” she entreated Whately. 
“Talk about something else. Were you 
flooded out, last night?” 

Barney gathered that he was camping in 
the woods nearby, but the location of the camp 
was not indicated. They began to talk about 
the news that they had read in the previous 
day’s paper. Barney heard them, inatten- 
tively. His mind was occupied. He looked, 
once, for a long time, at Mary Langton. He 
liked her. 

She knew it. “What is it, Barney?” 

“Nothin’,” he said, reddening. 

“Have some bacon?” 

“I had some.” 

“Have some more.” 

“Nuh-uh. Had enough.” 

Whately ht a cigarette and inhaled it 
thoughtfully. 

“I ’m goin’ out on the veranda,” Barney 
said, at last — shaving eaten all he could. He 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 129 

wanted to think things over; they would be 
clearer, perhaps, if he had Mary Langton out 
of his eyes and the operative’s window be- 
fore him. And he had to show himself, so 
that Babbing would understand that he had 
made his entrance into the bungalow success- 
fully. 

He came out the door upon his first real 
sight of the depth and breadth and distance 
of a mountain view; and it held him staring. 
Down the broad valley before him, a river 
looped its way like a garden path, among low 
hills of farmland that lay asleep in the sun- 
light, round and indolent; and some had been 
only half clipped of woods that bristled on 
their backs like patches of hair on a French 
poodle. Across the valley, the Catskills 
shouldered one another to look over the ridge 
at the farms that had been marching up 
through the forest, along the river, nearer and 
nearer, year by year. At the foot of the 
ridge lay the summer hotel, above Careyville, 
in a pine grove. The single upper window 


130 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

in its central gable watched Barney like an 

eye. 

He came out on the steps in his dressing 
gown, to show himself, and cautiously sema- 
phored with his right arm, raising it stiffly over 
his head. After a moment, he saw something 
white drop over the window sill and hang 
fluttering. It was their signal that they saw 
him. 

He was to raise both arms if he had located 
Whately. 

He hesitated. 

He turned back to the house. 

After all, there was no need of haste. 
Whately was not going to run away. 

His bath slippers made his footstep noise- 
less as he approached the door. He heard 
her say, in a low broken utterance: ‘T 
could n’t help thinking of yoWj dear, just like 
that, somewhere — all blood — in handcuffs — 
running all night. It’s terrible! I can’t 
bear it. You must — ” 

“But, dearest,” he protested, under his 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 131 

voice, ‘T ’m not a child. I can take care of 
myself better than that. Besides, I haven’t 
done anything wrong and they know it. 
That indictment was all a bluff. They have 
no more right to arrest me — 

“Then why not go back and face it? 
You—” 

“Because your governor — ” 

“I tell you, father wants you to. He 
does n’t want you to sacrifice yourself for him. 
And me? What ’s to become of me, if I ’m 
never to be able to see you — if you ’re always 
to be hiding and — and hunted! I know what 
father has done. It was illegal — but he 
didn’t think it was criminal. And I don’t. 
If they send him to jail — ” 

“We ’ll all be disgraced. For life.” 

“We ’re disgraced, now. We ’re only mak- 
ing it worse by having it thought that you — 
when you ’re innocent — Please do it, dear- 
est. Please. For my sake.” There were 
tears in her voice. 

Barney hurried back to the steps and threw 


132 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


both arms up over his head. The signal came 
out again on the window sill, instantly. 

It was done. They were coming. 

When he returned to the room, guiltily, 
Mary was still at the table and Whately was 
walking up and down. ‘T guess, I ’ll get my 
clothes on,” Barney explained, “an’ go ’n’ 
look up my hat — down the road.” 

Whately was near the inner door. “I ’ll 
get them,” he said. Mary did not speak. 
She was sitting with her elbows on the table, 
her hands lying clasped before her, staring 
aside at the window; and Barney imderstood 
that she was concealing tears. He took the 
clothes from Whately and hurried upstairs to 
dress. They would be coming in the auto- 
mobile. He had only one idea — to get away 
before they came. 

He limped down stairs very quietly in his 
broken shoes, his coat ripped at the shoulder, 
his trouser legs torn at the knees. He had 
intended to slip out without her noticing him, 
but she was sitting on the couch beside the 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 138 


fireplace near the foot of the stairs. “Come 
here, Barney,” she said. “We must get Annie 
to mend those tears.” She fingered and pat- 
ted them with a futile solicitude, smiling at 
him wanly. “Aren’t you afraid that they 
might see you looking for your hat? They ’ll 
be searching for you, won’t they?” 

“I don’t care if they do see me.” He looked 
down at his feet. 

She drew him to her and put an arm about 
him. “Why not?” 

“I guess I might as well let them pick me 
up.” 

Her arm tightened around him. She said, 
in a low voice: “That’s right, now. If you 
have n’t done anything wrong, you have noth- 
ing to be afraid of. And if you have, you 
ought to be brave enough to take your pun- 
ishment. . . . Your mother will help you, 
won’t she?” 

Barney nodded, hanging his head. 

“Will you write to me, if I can do any- 
thing?” 


134 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


He nodded again. 

She gave him her town address. ‘‘And, 
Barney, be a good boy. Won’t you? I want 
you to be such a big, brave, honest man.” 

Poor Barney could not answer. He was 
crying. 

She held him close. “Kiss me good-by, 
then — in case you don’t come back.” 

He put his arm around her neck childishly, 
and kissed her — and then he broke away from 
her caress and ran. 


He found his hat on the wood road, and He 
had no more than put it on before he snatched 
it oflp again to flag the approaching automo- 
bile, with Babbing in the front seat. “What 
has happened?” Babbing asked. “What ’s 
the matter with your head?” 

Barney waited till the car had stopped. 
He jumped on the running board. “Don’t 
tell them it was he pleaded. “An’ — ’n’ 
don’t put the cuffs on him there — in the house 


MOUNTAINS MEET NOT 135 


— will you, Chief? Not while she can see you. 
She — she ’s — ” 

“That’s all right,” Babbing interrupted, 
with a sudden gruff kindliness. “We ’ll fix 
everything all right for her. You trot along 
down to Careyville now, and Sam ’ll pick you 
up there later. Go ahead, Sam.” 

The car started with a jerk. Barney 
dropped back to the road, and ran away limp- 
ing, his lips trembling, pale with a self -pity- 
ing shame. He had seen that Babbing knew 
and understood. 

What he did not guess was that Babbing 
had foreseen and — in the broken handcuff and 
the story that went with it — ^had prophetically 
“planted.” 


IV 


THE KIDNAPPEES 

I 

B arney cook entered the opera- 
tives’ room of the Babhing Bureau 
twenty minutes late, and one of the detectives, 
at a typewriter desk, said: “The Chief wants 
to see you,^* 

His tone was ominous. Barney looked up 
guiltily at the clock. 

He had been given a holiday on the previ- 
ous day and told to “rest up” after his exploit 
in the Catskills. He had taken his rest on 
the streets, and at the moving picture shows. 
At night he had gone to a vaudeville theater 
with two of his old gang. It had “leaked” 
to them that he was a detective — a fact which 
should have been kept a professional secret. 

136 


THE KIDNAPPERS 187 

He had been posing and strutting in their eyes 
till after midnight. And he had overslept. 

He saw all these damning facts, as the ac- 
cusing explanation of his lateness, while he 
was still confronting the face of the clock. 
Consequently, he asked the operative, with 
a schoolboy air of innocence: “What’s he 
want to see me about?” 

He was leading up to a preliminary re- 
hearsal of his interview with Babbing. The 
man paused in his typewritting long enough 
to verify the last word that he had written; 
then he went on again, impatiently; and Bar- 
ney was left to face Babbing, and the score 
of his delinquencies, with no defense but the 
open countenance of virtue. 

He went, but he went unconfident. 

He had always been able to invent explana- 
tions and excuses that would pass muster in 
the schoolroom; and he had had a boy’s con- 
tempt for the gullibility of his elders; but Bab- 
bing had given him more respect for adult 
perspicacity. He could never tell how much 


138 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Babbing knew; and he found it impossible to 
lie with assurance among the covered pitfalls 
of Babbing’s inquiring silences. 

Of course, he could say that his mother had 
told Mrs. Jordan, next door, that he was 
working in the Babbing Bureau; and Mrs. 
Jordan had told her son “Dummy”; and 
Dummy had told everybody. And he had 
gone to the vaudeville show to get away from 
the curiosity of the neighborhood. And he 
was late getting down to the office because a 
bunch of fellows had been laying for him out- 
side, and he had hung around, inside, waiting 
lor them to go away, and — 

Babbing was busy at his desk. He asked, 
unexpectedly: “Who was that you were 
talking with — on the corner — as I came in?” 

It had been “Dummy” Jordan. Barney 
had to admit as much. 

“He ’s deaf and dumb, is he?” 

Barney hesitated. His story had cast 
Dummy Jordan for the part of village gos- 
sip. “Yes, ’r,” he confessed reluctantly. 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


139 


Babbing looked over his spectacles at him. 
“You can talk — on your fingers — pretty fiu- 
ently?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Well, what ’s the matter?” Babbing asked. 
“Who is this Dummy Jordan?” 

“No one. He ’s just the fullah that lives 
next door t’ us.” 

Babbing said, into an office telephone: 
“Bring me the file on the Dart gang.” He 
pressed a call button to summon his ofiice 
manager. He remarked, aside to Barney: 
“I don’t know what you ’re trying to conceal 
— Is it anything important?” 

“No, sir,” the ingenuous Barney answered. 

“All right. Save yourself the trouble of 
looking so innocent, then. Sit down.” 

He greeted the reverend gray hairs of 
his ofiice manager with “Arch, I ’ve got an 
idea for that Merriman disappearance. 
The woman who kept the lodging house at 
number 125 was a Mrs. Andrews, wasn’t 
she?” 


140 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

‘‘That,” Archibald said, “I have forgotten.” 

“Well, look it up. And have Billy type 
her a letter on our Wallbridge Chicago letter- 
head, introducing me as Adam Cook. Some- 
thing like this: ‘Dear Madam: I am giv- 
ing this letter to an old friend, Mr. Adam 
Cook, who expects to be in New York for 
some months on business and wishes to get 
comfortable, private rooms for self and son. 
Anything that you can do for him will be 
much appreciated by Yours truly’ — and have 
him sign it Charles J. Wallbridge. Date it 
back about ten days. And when he ’s typing 
it, have him put a 6 on top of the 5 in 125. 
Do you imderstand?” 

“Perfectly.” 

“Good. What are we using room 1047 
for?” 

“I think it ’s disengaged.” 

“Clear it out and fix it up for me as Adam 
Cook. I ’ll promote that tunneling machine 
again. Get the model in there, and the blue 
prints, and put Clara in charge. Be sure to 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


141 


have everything right, now. I ’ll move in, 
this afternoon, and I expect they ’ll start to 
check me up right away. We don’t want any 
holes in our cover.” 

‘T ’ll attend to it.” 

“And have the name painted on the door.” 

A clerk had entered with a file of type- 
written reports in a loose-leaf binder. Bab- 
bing had taken it while he was still talking to 
Archibald; and he turned over the pages, 
rapidly, as he talked. “That ’s right,” he 
said. “She ’s a Mrs. Josiah Andrews at num- 
ber 125. Go ahead.” 

Archibald went out softly, after the clerk; 
and Barney, having caught something that 
concerned the name of Cook in these prepara- 
tions for a plant, waited on the edge of his 
chair in guilty suspense. Babbing continued 
to read. 

“Well, Barney,” he said, still reading, 
“you ’d better get it off your mind, had n’t 
you?” 

“What?” 


142 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“Whatever it is that ’s bothering you. I 
have n’t time to put you through the third de- 
gree. Come on. Give it up.” 

Barney grinned sheepishly. “Dummy 
knows r ’m a — He knows I ’m workin’ 
here.” 

“And all the rest of your friends, eh?” 

“Yes, ’r.” 

“Huh! You’ll meet that on the street 
some day, when you least expect it. Go on.” 

Barney balked, silent. 

“For instance,” Babbing suggested, ‘^ou 
have n’t told me that you did n’t want to give 
up young Whately when you found him at 
Langton’s. Have you?” He swung around 
in his swivel chair. “Eh?” 

Barney shook his head. 

Babbing rose. “Well,” he said, walking 
up and down in a meditative promenade, 
“we ’d better clear that up. If you ’re going 
to be a detective, you ’ll have that sort of job 
turning up every other day. You ’re next 
thing to a pubhc hangman. And you ’ve got 


THE KIDNAPPERS 143 

to make up your mind to do your duty whether 
you like it or not.” 

He stopped to look out the window, at the 
roofs below; and his point of view broadened 
accordingly. “The morals of the situation 
are rather mixed. Society — people — the hu- 
man family — have decided that if they ’re to 
live together they must n’t kill, or steal from, 
or otherwise injure one another. They have 
made laws against these acts. And they pun- 
ish the man or woman who breaks the laws. 
In case of war, of course, killing and stealing 
are permitted by one branch of the family 
against another branch. But in time of 
peace, the officers of the law, as agents of 
society, are the only ones allowed to kill or 
otherwise injure their fellows. And then only 
in defense of society.” He turned on Bar- 
ney. “Do you understand?” 

Barney said he did. 

“Well, then — ” He came forward — “as a 
detective, you ’re allowed to do a great many 
things that would be punished in the private 


144 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
individual. You’re expected to swindle, and 
steal from, and lie to, and betray the enemies 
of society in any way you can, in order to de- 
feat them and defend society. It ’s your 
duty to do it, and do it diligently. If you 
don’t, you ’re as bad as the criminal. And 
that ’s the only moral law that binds you, pro- 
fessionally. 

‘‘But, in your private life,” — He wagged 
an emphatic forefinger — “you ’re bound by 
all the moralities that bind every one else. 
And in your dealings with me, you have to be 
an honest employee. Or take the conse- 
quences. When I send you out to get a man, 
you ’re a crook if you don’t use every means 
to bring him in, no matter what sympathy you 
feel for him or his mother or his sweetheart 
or any one else. Understand?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Good.” He went back to his desk. 
“I ’m telling you this because I have a job 
for you that I don’t want any fumbling on. 
I ’m going to plant you as a deaf mute. With 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


145 


this Dart gang. You ’ll have to be prepared 
with a trunk and a hand-bag full of good 
clothes. Corcoran ’ll go with you to see that 
you get them right. I ’ll give him instruc- 
tions. He ’ll take you — and your baggage — 
to rooms that I ’ll engage for us at the Hotel 
Haarlem. I ’ll pick you up there, as soon as 
you ’re fixed, and explain matters to you as we 
go along.” He took his office ’phone: ‘'Get 
Corcoran in here right away.” As he re- 
turned to his study of the Dart file, he said to 
Barney: “You can practise being deaf and 
dumb till he comes.” 

Barney grinned at this pleasantry as cheer- 
fully as a dog wags its tail when the voice of 
authority turns from reproof to forgiveness. 
He had not altogether understood Babbing’s 
lecture upon the morals of his profession; the 
young savage in him had not yet been suffi- 
ciently civilized to make him sensible of any 
social compact with his fellows. But he had 
the instinct of personal loyalty that keeps his 
people clannish; and he accepted Babbing’s 


146 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


scolding, without ill-will, humbly, as a de- 
served rebuke of bad faith. 

He accepted it, also, as a proof of Bab- 
bing’s interest. It had been his experience 
that all his elders who liked him, showed their 
affection by admonishment ; and he was aware, 
from Babbing’s manner, that he had made 
himself solid, as he would say, with the Chief. 
Moreover, he was going out on another case. 
As a deaf mute! He was likely to have some 
fun! And if any one could expect a boy to 
reflect upon the moral aspects of anything un- 
der such circumstances — 

Corcoran arrived in due course, silent, non- 
committal, with his hat on the back of his head, 
looking like a newspaper man, on the sporting 
page. When he had received his instructions, 
he said “Come on, kid,” slightingly, and he let 
Barney trot along behind him to the elevator. 
“Going to put you out as a dummy, eh?” He 
pressed the signal button. “I suppose you ’ll 
be able to get away with that, if you keep your 
mouth shut.” 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


147 


His manner was contemptuous. Barney had 
not forgotten their first experience together 
and Corcoran’s disgust at “this kid business” 
when he had stolen Cooper’s cipher code. 

He touched the detective’s elbow, mutely, 
and began to spell out an impertinent reply 
on his fingers. 

“Aw, can that/^ Corcoran said. He did 
not know the deaf and dumb alphabet, and it 
annoyed him. 

Barney hfted his eyebrows, frowned, flick- 
ered eloquently with his hands, pointed at Cor- 
coran, repeated his pantomime, and ended 
with his eyebrows up again. 

Corcoran said : “What the hell ’s the mat- 
ter with you?” 

Barney pointed to his mouth and to his ears, 
shook his head and launched into another 
gravely impudent communication. 

“I ’ll chuck you down the elevator shaft in a 
minute,” Corcoran growled. 

Barney spelled out on his fingers: “Yes, 
you will, you big stiff.” And it was evident 


148 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

from his face that he was making an insulting 

reply. 

Corcoran flushed and swore at him. Bar- 
ney grinned. In the elevator cage, he spelled 
out: “I Ve got your goat.” 

And he had. By the time they arrived at 
the Hotel Haarlem — with an auto full of pur- 
chases for Barney’s new role — Corcoran was 
in a speechless rage, and Barney, still consist- 
ently deaf and dumb, was enjoying himself 
like a young imp. 

“G — — Corcoran said, through his teeth, 
‘T hope this Dart gang cuts your throat. 
They ’ll do it, too, if they get half a chance.” 

II 

It was late in the afternoon when Adam 
Cook, accompanied by his afflicted son, de- 
scended from a taxi-cab in front of number 
126, rang the bell, and asked to see the mis- 
tress of the house. A discouraged-looking 
maid ushered them grudgingly into the parlor 
and left them there — in a room that appar- 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


149 


ently had been outfitted second-hand from all 
the discarded reps and plushes of all the de- 
funct boarding houses of the last generation. 

Barney looked around him and was dis- 
appointed. Corcoran’s prediction that the 
Dart gang would cut his throat if they got 
“half a chance,” had given him a promise of 
excitement; and Babbing had endorsed the 
promise with a further warning in the taxi- 
cab. “These people,” he had said, “are pro- 
fessional criminals. You can’t get past them 
with any mistakes, mind you. They ’re dan- 
gerous. If they suspect you ’re after them, 
they ’re deadly. They ’ll kill to get free. 
You ’ll have to watch out.” Consequently, 
Barney had entered the room with the feeling 
that he was about to penetrate a bandit’s 
lair. 

And there was an old upright piano, very 
yellow in the teeth — against a wall-paper of 
faded violets on faded pink — under a steel 
engraving of Lincoln’s cabinet, in a black 
frame. Between the lace curtains of the front 


150 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
windows a sheaf of dusty pampas plumes pre- 
served themselves aridly in a Japanese bronze 
vase of chipped plaster. The carpet had foot- 
paths worn threadbare in its design. No two 
chairs were mates. They looked as if they 
had never had mates — determined spinsters 
whom age had only hardened. Shabby gen- 
tility in a room could go no further without 
being mellowed into pathos. 

Babbing twinkled at it. He pointed Bar- 
ney to a chair and waited, standing. At the 
sound of a footstep in the hall, he faced the 
door — a mild-mannered, mild-eyed widower, 
accustomed to courtesy and evidently able to 
buy it. 

The mistress of the house proved to be one 
of those lean and angular women who dress 
and pipe-clay themselves to a military rigidity, 
with a high collar, a stiff belt, false hair, tal- 
cum powder, tight lacing and hard padding. 
Her features were large — all but her eyes, 
which were black and beady. No one could 
doubt her evident respectability. She even 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


151 


looked as if she suffered from indigestion. 
And the sight of her dampered the last im- 
patience of Barney’s expectation. Like a boy 
who has come to see melodrama and finds him- 
self fobbed off with expository dialogue, he 
settled down on himself to wait for the action 
to begin. 

Babbing had said to him: "‘You’ll have 
to look half-witted — simple — dotty. Under- 
stand?” No difficulty about that. Barney 
knew her sort. He had listened to one like 
her talking to his mother, once, till his legs 
went to sleep. She was a bore. 

She acknowledged Bathing’s greeting as 
inhospitably as a hired housekeeper, and he ex- 
plained that he was Adam Cook, from Chi- 
cago, now living at the Hotel Haarlem, but 
looking for rooms for himself and his young 
son, in some respectable house in which he 
could leave the boy safely while he was away 
at his office. "T have a letter of introduction 
to you, m’am,” he said; and he laid down his 
hat, got out his glasses, put them on, took them 


152 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

off to polish them, put them on again, and 
began to search through his many pockets — 
and the many papers in them — for the letter. 

Meanwhile he did not interrupt his explana- 
tions. His son, he confided, was deaf and 
dumb, and they had come to New York to 
have him taught hp-reading at the Deaf and 
Dumb Institute. He had transferred his 
business from Chicago and opened offices in 
the Cranmer building, but he had found it 
impossible to leave the boy alone in a hotel, 
even though he had engaged a young woman 
from the Institute to come to their rooms 
every morning to give him instruction in lip 
reading. The boy, to tell the truth, was 
backward. Of course. Naturally. 

Barney looked it. He was regarding the 
poses of Lincoln’s cabinet with a dull endur- 
ance. 

Still in pursuit of the letter, Babbing had 
taken out his pocket-book, and in searching 
through it he spilled out a number of hundred 
dollar bills on the floor. She instantly un- 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


153 


bent at sight of them, and helped him pick 
them up, in spite of his pohte remonstrances. 
He was very fussily annoyed by his own clum- 
siness, and he crammed the bills into his trou- 
sers pocket with no appearance of respect 
for their value. 

She asked: “Won’t you sit down, Mr. 
Cook? You say you have a letter of intro- 
duction to me?” 

“I have, m’am,” he said, “if I can find it.” 

“From whom?” 

“From your friend Mr. Wallbridge.” He 
was going through the envelopes from his 
breast pocket, for the second time. 

“Wallbridge?” 

“Of Chicago. Charles J. Wallbridge. 
Yes, ’m.” 

She seemed puzzled. “I don’t — ^recall the 
name.” 

“Here! I have it.” He handed the let- 
ter to her with an air of triumph. 

She read it. She re-read it. And it was 
evident, during the second reading, that she 


154 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


was making up her mind what to do. Bab- 
bing watched her over his benevolent specta- 
cles. When she raised her eyes to his, she 
smiled in the way that is called “fetching” — 
when it succeeds. 

"'My name is Mrs. Dart,” she said. “This 
is for a Mrs. Andrews who has a lodging house 
across the street.” And her tone in reference 
to Mrs. Andrews and the “lodging house” was 
slighting. 

Babbing stammered: “Am I — Have 
I — Across the street, m’am?” 

“At one-twenty-five.” 

“But—” 

She pointed to the street number in the 
superscription of the letter. “It ’s the fault of 
the typewriter, you see. There ’s both a five 
and a six.” 

One glance satisfied Babbing that it was 
even so. He plucked off his spectacles, dis- 
tressed, and apologetic. “I beg your pardon, 
Mrs.—” 

“Dart.” 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


155 


‘‘Mrs. Dart, I beg your pardon. I Ve been 
wasting your time. I Ve intruded on — ” 

“Not at all/’ she interrupted, with formal 
politeness. “I ’m glad to have met you. I 
don’t rent rooms, of course. This is a private 
residence. My son and his wife live here with 
me, and we rent our top floor to some young 
men — business men — who are friends of my 
son’s. But — ” 

Babbing was not listening. He looked 
around him as if he were rather lost. “Across 
the — But that’s the north side, isn’t it? 
And I particularly wanted a back room that 
would be sunny.” He appealed to her in a 
manner of bewildered helplessness. 

“Mr. Cook — ” She hesitated — “I don’t 
know who the gentleman is who has referred 
you to that house, but I do know — ” 

He broke in, uneasily: “Wallbridge? 
He ’s a stock broker, m’am. I don’t know 
him very well, except in a business way.” 

She nodded several times, compressing her 
lips. 


156 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘‘Do you mean — ” he asked, alarmed. 

“Your son,” she said, “would need to be not 
only deaf but blind!” 

They both glanced at Barney. He had 
been sitting in his chair by the window, play- 
ing a game with himself. He had been trying 
to imagine that he could not hear what they 
were saying; and there were moments when 
he almost succeeded. As a natural conse- 
quence of this division in his mind, his eyes 
found that both Babbing and she looked 
strange. Her nose was grotesquely large, 
and it showed purplish through her face-pow- 
der. Babbing was small and fat and funny. 
She simpered. Babbing watched her as if he 
were hypnotized. They moved, unexpect- 
edly, like a pair of marionettes. 

When they turned to him, they found him 
observing them with a mute and glassy stare. 
They went on with their palaver. Barney 
began to find it tedious. 

Mrs. Dart was taking a charitable interest 
in their housing problem, and Babbing’s 


They found him observing them with a mnte and glassy stare 









THE KIDNAPPERS 


159 


vague and rambling impracticality encour- 
aged her to advise him. He was a stranger to 
New York. He did not know whether it 
would be possible to get two large rooms, with 
bath, in a private family, no matter what one 
paid for them. He did not care to go to a 
boarding house. New York, he knew, was 
not hke Chicago; people were less friendly; 
they were more suspicious of strangers; they 
would not admit you to their family circle so 
readily. 

He would like to get rooms in this quarter, 
because it was so convenient to the Institute. 
He liked these old-fashioned houses ; they were 
so home-like. The high ceilings made them 
cool. Lots of air. And the big windows. 
And the walls, being thick, made the rooms 
quiet. Very different from a hotel. Even 
in the Haarlem, where he was paying seventy- 
five dollars a week, he had none of the real 
comforts of quiet and privacy. His tastes 
were simple. He did not care for show. 

And so forth. 


160 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Mrs. Dart took him to see the large room 
behind the parlor — which she herself was oc- 
cupying — as an example of the sort of room 
that he ought to try to get. And when they 
returned to Barney, they were already ar- 
ranging the terms on which Babbing could 
rent that room from her, and the small bed- 
room behind it. It was exactly what he 
wanted. And would she mind if he put some 
of his own furniture into it, as soon as he could 
get it sent from Chicago? He liked to have 
his things about him. They had associations. 

She understood that, she said. Her son 
was always at her to get rid of her old trash, 
as he called it, but she could not bear to part 
with it. 

Barney swallowed a yawn. 

They were having a very genial, chatty 
time together, though Babbing confessed that 
he was worried about Mrs. Andrews and his 
friendly obligation to deliver Wallbridge’s 
letter. It was at last decided that he should 
cross the street and present his introduction. 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


161 


look at the rooms offered to him, and decide 
against them. Then he could return to the 
hotel, have his baggage brought to Mrs. 
Dart’s next day, and move, that evening, into 
her charming apartment. 

He paid her fifty dollars, in advance, for 
two weeks’ rent. She patted Barney on the 
back, as they went to the door, and babied him, 
ingratiatingly ; he remained stolid without any 
effort. She even shook hands with him on the 
threshold; and she had a large-wristed, bony, 
cold hand that made him think of pickled pig’s 
feet. 

“You are fond of children, m’am,” Babbing 
said. 

She had to admit it; and Babbing took his 
leave in the subduedly grateful manner of a 
widower who has been rescued from perplexi- 
ties by a woman’s instinctive sympathy for 
the unmanaged male. 

He put Barney in the cab and left him there 
while he went to present his letter to Mrs. 
Andrews. And, of course, he did not present 


162 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


it, although he took it from his pocket while 
he was standing at the door, and entered carry- 
ing it in his hand. He merely asked to see 
the furnished room that was advertised for 
rent by a printed card on the door jamb; 
and he found this room not at all to his lik- 
ing. 

When he returned to Barney and they 
started back to the hotel, he preserved a 
thoughtful silence. ‘T don’t know whether 
we can get away with it or not,” he said, at 
last. “She plays a great game.” 

“What do I have to do next?” Barney 
asked, expectantly. 

“Nothing but keep your mouth shut,” he 
replied. “If there ’s anything going to be 
done, she ’ll do it.” 

Barney had been relieved to escape from 
the sight of her. He did not relish the pros- 
pect of returning. He said, disparagingly: 
“What do you want her for?” 

And Babbing answered: “The less you 
know about that, the better. Give me the 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


163 


deaf and dumb alphabet. I ’ll have to work 
that up. We Ve got to be thorough on this 
job, or we ’ll find ourselves in a hole.” 

It was this thoroughness, finally, that 
brought Barney back to a sense of pleasurable 
excitement in the plant. Not only did Bab- 
bing “work up” the deaf and dumb alphabet. 
He coached Barney on the details of their life 
in Chicago, the death of his mother there, and 
the imaginary incidents of his kidnapping, 
some years before. He took all the New 
York labels from his own clothes and from 
Barney’s. He had Corcoran buy some well- 
thumbed second-hand picture books, and he 
wrote in them: “To Barney, from his affec- 
tionate Papa.” He filled his pockets with 
fraudulent letters addressed to Adam Cook 
about his tunneling machine; and he saw that 
there was nothing suspicious in Barney’s pos- 
session. 

“Now,” he said, on their way to the house, 
“don’t ever sit with your back to a door. 
Don’t go to sleep until you ’re sure that your 


164 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
window and your door are both locked. Be 
on the lookout all the time to see that they 
don’t get a chance to startle you into betraying 
yourself. Understand ? 

“They may get some one in to try to pump 
you. If they do, be as stupid as you can. 
You’re not supposed to be more than half- 
witted anyway. 

“Dodge any one you know on the streets. 
Don’t speak to anybody, anywhere. Not 
even to me. No matter what happens, don’t 
make any outcry. If we get into a tight 
place, the fact that you ’re deaf and dumb is 
all that will save you from serious trouble. 
Our boys will be watching the house. And 
watching you on the streets. And if anything 
happens, let it happen — and keep quiet — and 
wait — and we ’ll get to you.” 

“What ’s going to happen?” Barney asked, 
thrilled. 

“Probably nothing at all,” Babbing said. 
“We ’re fishing — with you for bait. They 
may not rise to you. If they do, don’t worry 


THE KIDNAPPERS 165 

— ^that ’s all. We ’ll have the line on you, all 
the time.” 


Ill 

So, with Barney wriggling happily under 
the ticklish apprehension of being a decoy, 
they settled down in their dingy room to the 
routine which Babbing arranged for them. 
The maid served them their breakfast in their 
apartment, on an old-fashioned card table at 
the foot of Babbing’s folding bed. She made 
up Barney’s room while they were still at 
table, and Babbing lingered over his newspa- 
per until a young woman from his ofBce — 
playing the part of a teacher from the Insti- 
tute — came to give Barney his pretended les- 
sons in lip reading. Babbing left her in 
charge and went to his work. At midday 
she took Barney out to luncheon at a nearby 
restaurant, and brought him back to the house 
afterward. He remained there, amusing him- 
self in solitude, till five o’clock, when Babbing 
arrived. They went for a walk together. 


166 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


dined together at some cafe, and spent the 
evening together either in their rooms or — 
presumably — seeing the sights. Mrs. Dart 
seemed to take no more than a kindly land- 
lady’s interest in their doings, and Barney re- 
mained dumb so religiously that his mouth 
ached. 

But under the surface of this daily round, 
Barney saw various hidden activities always 
on the alert. The teacher who came to give 
him lip readings, spied and listened at the 
door, and watched about her in the restaurant 
and on the streets. He recognized opera- 
tives of the Babbing Bureau in the casual 
passers-by wherever he went. Babbing con- 
tinually “tested” himself to see whether he 
was being followed when he was out with Bar- 
ney; and when they went to the Cranmer 
building of an evening, it was always in the 
office of Adam Cook that Babbing received 
his men and worked on his cases. They were 
reporting regularly on the Dart gang. 

Barney was not allowed to go alone on the 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


167 


streets. And Babbing explained to Mrs. 
Dart, one morning, in the natural course of 
conversation, that his son had been kidnapped 
in Chicago, some years previous, and ran- 
somed for five thousand dollars; and since 
that time, another attempt had been made to 
steal him; and, in fact, they had moved from 
Chicago because of this second attempt; and 
Babbing had not felt it safe to leave Barney 
in a hotel in New York; and that was the real 
reason why they had sought rooms in a pri- 
vate residence. 

Babbing blurted it all out in a worried rush, 
once he had begun it; and Mrs. Dart heard 
him sympathetically. She even volunteered 
to keep an eye on Barney in the afternoons, 
to make sure that he did not slip out while 
no one was watching him. Babbing was 
deeply indebted to her. It relieved his mind 
more than he could say. 

When she had left the room, he spelled out 
to Barney on his fingers: “Watch yourself.” 

And Barney watched, as eager as young 


168 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
hope. He was leading a life of elegant idle- 
ness, sleeping late, eating unlimitedly, wear- 
ing good clothes and doing no work whatever ; 
and by contrast with his days as a telegraph 
boy, he was a son of poverty who had fallen 
heir to millions. Consequently, he was full of 
a restless vitality that remained bottled up in 
him like an effervescence. He made his In- 
stitute teacher take lessons from him so that 
she could understand “dummy talk”; for she 
refused to let him whisper to her, even in the 
privacy of his room — obeying Babbing’s or- 
ders. And when he was left to his solitary 
afternoons, he roamed around impatiently, un- 
able to take any interest in the “baby books” 
that his affectionate Papa had bought for him. 
He had been carefully deprived of the news- 
papers, which he was supposed to be too im- 
mature to understand. “Geel” he said to 
himself, “a fullah might ’s well be in a coop. 
It would n’t hurt ’em to let me go to a movey. 
Gee, this is fierce. If somethin’ don’t hap- 
pen soon, I ’ll blow up an’ bust.” 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


169 


He was being taught the detective’s pa- 
tience — the patience of a cat at a mouse hole. 

One afternoon, Mrs. Dart came in with a 
workman, carrying a table to replace the card 
table which she wished to remove. Barney was 
sitting by the window, apparently absorbed in 
a picture book; and he watched them with an 
interest that was not assumed. Any intru- 
sion was welcome. 

The workman scrutinized him casually. 
“Looks as if he could kick,” he said to the 
table. And Mrs. Dart answered, hurriedly: 
“Sh! He can read your lips.” 

She nodded and smiled to Barney, who 
watched her blankly. As they went out, tak- 
ing the card table, he heard the man mutter 
something about “blind-fold.” 

And he sat staring at the closed door as if 
he were indeed a dummy. He had been so in- 
tent upon his own deceits — and Babbing’s — 
that he had neither seen nor suspected the de- 
ceits of his opponents. He had accepted Mrs. 
Dart as a mildly-scheming bore who had been 


170 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
tricked into admitting them to her house; and 
he had despised her. Her “Sh! He can read 
your lips” — followed by her affected smile to 
him as she went out — had goose-fleshed him, 
less with fear of her than with a panic at his 
own stupidity. What were they up to? 
How had he failed to see any signs of it be- 
fore? How far had they gone in it? ‘‘Looks 
as if he could kick.” The man had come 
there, disguised, to size him up. To what 
end? What were they going to do to him? 

Barney had the sensations of the African 
hunter who found himself trailed by his lion. 

He was relieved by the thought that Bab- 
bing was also out after the animal, and he 
ran to the door to listen. Hearing nothing, 
he began to caper, excitedly. Something was 
going to “happen” at last! Babbing would 
come at five o’clock, and they would consult 
together. His term of confinement would 
end in a dramatic springing of the trap for 
which he had been the bait. He began to 
“shadow fight” around the room, boxing the 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


171 


air with jubilant leads and counters, ducking 
and side-stepping and planting mighty blows. 

By the time that he had winded himself 
with the violence of this exercise, he had 
worked off enough of his excitement to sit 
again. Gee! if Babbing would only come 
now. But Babbing was not due till five, and 
it was vain to expect him before that time. 
As Adam Cook, it was part of his character 
to be methodical. 

At four o’clock the doorbell rang, and Bar- 
ney put his ear to the hall-door, alertly. He 
heard the maid go to answer the bell. In a 
moment he heard her returning down the hall, 
followed by a heavier footfall. He darted 
back to his seat by the window in time to be 
busy with a picture book when she knocked. 
He disregarded the knock, of course. She 
put her head in. “That ’s him,” she said. 

Barney looked up. A young man with a 
wrinkled mouth smiled falsely at him, shifted 
his flat-brimmed derby from his right hand 
to his left, took an envelope from the pocket 


172 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

of his natty blue serge, and crossed the room 
to dehver it. His feet were long and thin. 
He looked down at them — after he had handed 
Barney the envelope — smoothing his plas- 
tered black hair on the back of his head with 
the flat of his palm. 

Barney knew him at once for what he was. 
The East Side breeds them by the hundreds, 
to be cadets, gangsters, touts, runners-up, the 
little jackals of organized vice protected by 
politics. Barney hated them as kikes, de- 
spised them as parasites, loathed them as 
cheap skates, and knew that they were dan- 
gerous because they shot where his own sort 
of tough would use the instruments of bat- 
tery. 

The letter was a typewritten note that read : 
“My dear Boy; I am to have dinner with a 
friend, uptown. I am sending an auto for 
you. Come with the bearer.” It was signed 
“Your affectionate Papa,” in the handwriting 
of Babbing’s inscription in his picture books. 

Barney guessed that it was a forgery. 


THE KIDNAPPERS 173 

He was at an age when the intelligence, 
like the voice, has moments of adult bass, and 
moments when it cracks and runs up to a 
boyish treble; but, in many practical affairs 
of life, his mind had been matured by his ex- 
perience on the streets; and within the limits 
of that experience he was as alert as a young 
fox. He understood that he was being kid- 
napped by ‘‘a bunch o’ crooks.” He knew, 
from the sample before him, that the men 
might be murderous. Yet the situation, for 
the instant, seemed almost amusing to him, 
and the men nearly ridiculous. Conceive the 
emotions of a street mongrel when it sees it- 
self stolen, with infinite precautions, by a thief 
who expects to get a reward for returning 
it! 

He put the letter in his pocket and went to 
his bedroom for his hat. He noticed himself 
in his glass — rather pale — and he smiled at 
his reflection reassuringly. Of course, Bab- 
bing had planned for all this. He had ex- 
pected them to kidnap him. They would 


174 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

take him to some secret den, and he would 
overhear everything they said, and then, when 
he had been rescued, his testimony would con- 
vict them of all the crimes that had ever been 
pictured in the Sunday supplements. 

It was the thought of these crimes that 
made him pale. He remembered Corcoran’s 
“They’ll cut your throat, if they get half a 
chance.” And Babbing’s “They ’ll kill to get 
free.” He found himself afflicted with a cold 
crawling in his insides ; and he wished that the 
plant might have been arranged so that Bab- 
bing could accompany him. His mind ran 
up into boyish trebles again when he imagined 
the bandits’ lair in which he would be hidden. 
It was a stage setting from a Bowery melo- 
drama, and its general atmosphere was shud- 
derful. 

He was returned to the realities by the sight 
of the young crook who waited for him. The 
fellow was obviously nervous and in a hurry 
to get away; his anxiety put Barney more at 
ease, and he looked around the room as if he 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


175 


were in search of something. His kidnapper 
stood at the hall door, with his hand on the 
knob, his hat already on his head, eyeing him 
impatiently. Barney went back to his bed- 
room. 

The crook followed to the bedroom door and 
beckoned to Barney to come along; and Bar- 
ney, of course, stopped to ask, on his fingers, 
“What?” The other shook his head, showed 
his watch, pointed over his shoulder with his 
thumb and said, under his voice: “Come on, 
you damn dummy. I got no time — ” He 
choked down his impatience and tried to smile 
alluringly. Barney gazed at that smile like 
a cradled infant who sees teeth for the first 
time. He was repeating the success of his 
performance with Corcoran and enjoying an 
artist’s triumph. 

It took nearly five minutes to get him to the 
street entrance, and there his impatient ab- 
ductor went ahead, down the steps, to open 
the door of a ramshackle taxi-cab that was 
waiting for them, with its motor thumping. 


176 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


It was making as much noise as a crosstown 
trolley car with a flat wheel. 

Barney saw Corcoran far down the street. 

He slipped back into the house again to 
give the detective time to reach them, and he 
grinned in the privacy of his room, enjoying 
himself. At the thought that the men might 
get frightened and go off without him, he 
hurried out again, taking a picture book as if 
he had returned for that. 

Corcoran had disappeared. 

The street was empty. 

The houses looked blank. 

The man at the door of the taxi smiled 
and wagged a hooked Anger at him. And 
Barney stood on the steps, stupidly reluctant, 
his book xmder his arm, paralyzed by the 
thought that Corcoran had deserted him — to 
be revenged. 

If the auto had been the basket of a balloon, 
ready to leap into space with him he could 
not have approached it with a more fascinated 
mind in a more apprehensive body. He drew 


THE KIDNAPPERS 177 

a fortifying long breath. When he got in, 
and the auto started, his physical excitement 
was such that the first jerk of the forward 
movement set him gulping. He was off. 

He was off on all imaginable wild adven- 
tures. 

He foresaw a thrilling pursuit of the taxi- 
cab, across the state, by Babbing and his 
operatives in an automobile that showed at 
the foot of every hill just as they topped it 
and shot down the other side. He foresaw 
himself, tied hand and foot, lying on a pallet 
of straw in a cellar, guarded by an old hag 
with a face hke a pick, who muttered to her- 
self about the murders she had committed, and 
gnawed at her crooked fingers. He tried to 
escape through a grated coal hole, and they 
caught him and bound him to a post and fixed 
up a shot-gun with a string tied to the trigger 
from the knob of the door, so that if any one 
attempted to get in to rescue him while they 
were away, the gun would explode and shoot 
him through the heart. And Babbing — 


178 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

“Go easy, Gus,’’ his kidnapper warned the 
driver. “We don’t want any argument with 
the traffic squad.” 

They slowed at the corner, waiting for an 
opening in the stream of traffic that flowed 
north. Barney saw that traffic with large 
dumb eyes from which all intelligence had 
withdrawn, inward, to the more vivid pictures 
of a fancy that was fearful with delight. 
Some one came out from the curb, stepped 
on the running-board and opened the cab door. 

It was Corcoran. 

Another operative clambered in beside the 
driver. 

“How do. Tip,” Corcoran greeted Bar- 
ney’s captor. “They want to see you down 
at the office.” He squeezed into the cab 
and forced down one of the small folding 
seats for himself. The driver had jammed on 
the brakes. “Tip” stared at the detective. 
“What d’ yuh want?” 

And Barney saw himself checked in the 
mid-flight of adventure by this premature in- 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


179 


trusion of help. “Gee!” he said to himself. 
“The big boob! Why couldn’t he leave us 
alone fer a minute !” 

“They want to see you,” Corcoran said, 
“about the same old trouble. I ’ve been look- 
ing for you all day.” 

“Well, I ’m busy.” 

“Won’t take you a second. Run along 
down in the machine. I ’ll go with you.” 

“Now look-a-here, Cork,” he protested 
plaintively, “you ’ve been over me so often 
on that damn ol’ frame up of yours — I 
don’t know a thing about the bus’ness, an’ I 
can tell you that, here, without wastin’ gaso- 
line.” 

Corcoran noticed Barney. “Who’s your 
young friend?” 

“It don’t matter who he is. I was told to 
take him uptown to keep a date, an’ I got to 
do it. How long ’ll you want me?” 

“About five minutes.” 

Tip cursed. “All right. I ’ll get out. 
The kid can go up alone.” 


180 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘'They want to see Gus, too. Better come 
along as you are. We won’t keep you any 
time. Who is the kid?” 

“Oh, hell, what difference does it make!” 
He was a thief accidentally intercepted by a 
policeman while making off with stolen prop- 
erty concealed on him. His one play was to 
go with the olBcer without arousing suspicion, 
and drop the stolen goods while the eyes of 
the law were averted. Barney, at least, could 
not betray him. 

“Back up, Gus,” he ordered the driver. 
“We ’ve got to go down with these people an’ 
help ’em put up a bluff that they ’re earnin’ 
their wages. Don’t you know any one else 
in this burg to make a stall with, Cork, excep’ 
me?” 

Corcoran laughed, “No, Tip. You’re my 
only meal ticket.” 

He had to go, and it was to his profit to go 
good-naturedly. He made himself pleasant 
on the way down to the Babbing Bureau, 
laughing and telling stories, with a convincing 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


181 


appearance of innocence; and he only lost his 
temper for a moment when Barney could not 
be made to understand that he was to wait in 
the taxi while the others went into the Cran- 
mer Building. That young dummy (at a 
sign from Corcoran) insisted on accompany- 
ing them to the detective offices, making an 
effort to show his father’s letter every time 
that Tip tried to turn him back. Tip did not 
wish that document exposed, under the cir- 
cumstances. He had to let Barney follow, in 
order to prevent him from appealing to Cor- 
coran with the letter. 

It was Archibald, impersonating Babbing, 
who received them at Babbing’s desk. He 
broke the news to Meyers that he and his 
driver, Gus Kane, were ‘‘wanted” on a charge 
of attempting to kidnap Barney Cook, son of 
Adam Cook, who had retained the Bureau to 
protect his son from a repetition of his Chi- 
cago adventure. (“Good night r Kane 
said.) And Barney, still worrying about his 
rendezvous with his affectionate parent, pro- 


182 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

duced his letter inquiringly, and clinched the 
case against the kidnappers. 

“Now,” Archibald said formally — after 
Tip Meyers had lied and struggled and sunk 
himself deeper and deeper into the quick- 
sand — “the only thing for you to do is to come 
across with the evidence that will bring the 
real criminals to justice, not only in the pres- 
ent case, but in the Merriman disappearance. 
We want Mrs. Dart and her husband. We 
don’t care so much about you. I may say 
that when we heard where Mr. Cook was liv- 
ing, we expected something of this sort to 
happen, and we prepared for it. We are 
now in a position to provide that the Cook 
case need not be prosecuted, if you decide to 
give us the benefit of your assistance in the 
other matter. Otherwise, of course, you 
know what the penalty is for kidnapping. 
Corcoran, you might take this boy back to his 
father. And send a stenographer in here as 
you go out.” 

Meyers, with no suspicion of the trick that 


THE KIDNAPPERS 


183 


was being played on him, looked at Barney and 
saw himself caught rtd-handed. He rubbed 
a wrist reflectively, as if anticipating the hand- 
cuff on it. ‘‘Well,” he said, ‘T ’m it. If we 
turn up the rest, you ’ll let me an’ Gus clear 
o’ this Cook business, do you?” 

“That ’s the bargain,” Archibald agreed. 

Corcoran beckoned to Barney to follow 
him. Outside, he said: “You’d better get 
out of here until we ’re done with these peo- 
ple.” 

“Where ’s the Chief?” 

“He ’s down there, still — waiting for word 
to grab Mrs. Dart.” 

“Well, say,” Barney complained, “if you ’d 
’a’ left me alone fer a minute I ’d ’a’ had the 
whole gang!” 

“Gee whizz, kid,” Corcoran sneered at him. 
“Who do you think you are?” 

Barney waved him off. “I ’m Little 
Pussy-foot, the Boy Scout of the Metrollopis. 
If you get stuck again on this job, let me 
know. Ta-ta!” 


184 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“You ’re too free with your mouth,” Cor- 
coran growled, over his shoulder as he went. 

“Free I” Barney said. “I could talk my 
teeth loose.” He swaggered to the elevator, 
whistling sibilantly. It was a relief even to 
whistle. “Take it from me, kid,” he told him- 
self, “this ’s no job fer a boy sopranner. 
You ’ve got cobwebs on your top notes.” 


V 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 
I 

B y this time, Barney Cook was a sleuth 
of several weeks’ experience. Dis- 
guised as a newsboy, he had kept watch over 
a post-box on a street comer until he had 
succeeded in identifying a blackmailer who 
was sending threatening letters to a client of 
the Babbing Bureau. Hidden in the cloak 
room of a Brooklyn machine shop, he had 
spied a confidential clerk putting drawings of 
a new lathe into the overcoat pocket of a 
confederate who was selling trade secrets to 
a rival company. He had peddled chewing 
gum at a subway entrance in Harlem, on 
the lookout for a cashier who was leading a 
double life; and he had located the flat in 
which the suspect concealed himself. Out at 

185 


186 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

all hours of the night, eating from his pocket, 
and sleeping only when he was off shift, he 
had enjoyed the life of a street Arab, gloat- 
ing over his adventures and taking his pay 
home to his mother, without coimting it, as 
contemptuous as a young genius for the wages 
of his art. 

But he had also to make out daily reports 
of his hours on duty, the items of his expenses, 
and those incidents of his day’s work that con- 
cerned the case on which he was engaged. 
And no school-room compositions could have 
been more tedious. At first he had been al- 
lowed to narrate his report to a stenographer, 
who put it into shape and typed it for him; 
later, he was required to write it out, for the 
stenographer to correct and typewrite; but 
now he had to type it himself, and retype it 
when the stenographer had revised his spell- 
ing and his punctuation, and then type it again 
if the office manager edited it — ^which he in- 
variably did. 

No cub reporter was ever more harassed. 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 187 

After hours of exhausting “leg- work/’ he had 
to hang over his machine till the back of his 
neck ached, pounding the keys till his stubby 
fingers were sore. He had to learn to spell. 
It was evident that he could never learn to 
punctuate. He had moments when he was 
as unhappy as if he had been sent back to 
school. 

He was enduring such a moment, in the 
operatives’ room, on this particular morning, 
when he was called to Babbing’s private office 
by a message on the office ’phone ; and he went 
as eagerly as if it were the recess bell that had 
rung. His admiration of “the Chief” had 
mounted to hero worship. If this little, el- 
derly, fat man had been a companionable 
father, an adventurous elder brother, and a 
rich uncle all in one, Barney could not have 
looked up to him with a more idolizing eye, 
with a more possessive trust and absorbed de- 
votion. 

He found Babbing talking to a client — a 
heavy-shouldered, black young man, with a 


188 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

remarkable forehead — whom he introduced as 
Mr. P. P. Harper. ‘T think I ’ll put you in 
his office,” Babbing explained, “as an office 
boy — from what he has told me of the case. 
Sit down. I want you to hear the details.” 

Harper was looking Barney over, and he 
did not notice the slow, significant scrutiny 
with which Babbing put the boy on his guard. 
Barney turned from that glance and regarded 
Harper innocently. 

“Is he a detective?” Harper asked. 

“You would never suspect it, eh?” Babbing 
said. 

“I certainly would not.” 

“That ’s what makes him so successful. 
Tell me, now; your office is in the Broad Street 
Building?” 

“Yes.” 

“Are you a broker?” 

“No, I ’m a promoter,” Harper answered. 
He settled back comfortably in his chair, 
“And a financial adviser.” 

“For whom?” 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 189 


“Well, chiefly, for the Van Amberg estate.” 

Babbing turned to Barney, who had seated 
himself at the left of the desk. “Mr. 
Harper,” he explained, “is being annoyed by 
anonymous letters. He wants us to And out 
who ’s sending them.” And again there was 
evidently concealed, behind his placid spec- 
tacles, some private thought which the boy 
could not decipher. 

Harper said: “They don’t come to me. 
To my wife.” 

“What put the Van Amberg estate in your 
ofiice?” 

“My wife was the only daughter of old 
Jacob Van Amberg?” 

“Had he any other children?” 

“A son.” 

“Are you his flnancial adviser, also?” 

“No. He handles his own property.” 

“And you handle your wife’s?” 

“Yes.” 

“Why don’t you handle your brother-in- 
law’s too? Smoke?” 


190 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Babbing had taken a box of cigars from a 
drawer of his desk. Harper selected one me- 
chanically. “My relations with my brother- 
in-law are not very cordial. Don’t you smoke 
yourself?” 

Babbing had closed the box. “No,” he 
said. “That ’s one of the little pleasures that 
we detectives have to deny ourselves.” 

“Why so?” 

“For the same reason as circus acrobats. 
And jugglers. We ’re frequently in places 
where the trembling of a hand would arouse 
suspicion. Tobacco affects the control that a 
man has over his nerves.” 

Babbing was putting the box away. He 
did not appear to notice that Harper’s hand 
shook as he held a match to his cigar. Bar- 
ney noticed it. He had already noticed that 
Babbing’s tone of voice was somewhat too 
innocent. 

Harper exhaled the smoke appreciatively. 
“You keep good cigars for your clients.” 

“Not altogether for my clients,” Babbing 


.THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 191 

explained. ‘'They ’re strong enough to re- 
lease the little unconscious movements of the 
body that indicate when a man ’s lying. I 
use them on suspects. Tell me: Are your 
relations with your brother-in-law such that 
these letters might be coming — ” 

“Hardly,” Harper put in. “I ’m unwill- 
ing to think that he — ” 

“Would you mind telling me about him?” 

“No. Certainly not. Confidentially.” He 
glanced at Barney. 

Babbing replied, to that glance: “Per- 
fectly trustworthy. And not as young as he 
looks. He got his training in the Secret 
Service before he came to me. His father 
was a government operative. Used to put 
him through transoms to open doors — and to 
shadow persons who would ’ve suspected any 
one older.” 

He invented it with such easy conviction 
that Barney almost believed it himself. 

“Well,” Harper said, “I met Van Amberg 
first at college. We were . . . very chummy 


192 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

• . . for a while. I met his sister through 
him. He invited me to visit his home, during 
the Easter holidays.” 

“And when did you quarrel?” 

“When he practically accused me of want- 
ing to marry her for her money.” 

“You were not wealthy, then?” 

“No, and I ’m not wealthy now. I was 
studying medicine when I married, and I gave 
it up — at her request — ^to look after the in- 
vestments, the properties, that were left to 
her by her father. I ’ve taken a commission 
out of the estate, but it has never more than 
paid my expenses.” 

“So — if these anonymous letters to your 
wife were to succeed in poisoning her mind 
against you — you ’d be ruined financially. 
Is that the situation?” 

Harper looked narrowly at his cigar; it had 
gone out. “I ’m not so much concerned about 
the financial aspects of it. I Ve been very 
happy with my wife. And I ’m fond of my 
boy.” 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 193 

“Have you any of these letters?’’ 

“No.” 

“Any copies of them?” 

“No. ... As a matter of fact — she’s not 
aware that I know she ’s been receiving them.” 

“And how do you know it?” 

“I had felt, for some time that there was 
something wrong. I had to take measures to 
protect myself.” 

“I see. Have you noticed anything else — 
besides the letters?” 

“Well, I ’ve had an idea that I was being 
followed on the street, and I supposed that 
the person interested in separating us had em- 
ployed some crooked private detective to 
work up a case against me.” 

“I see.” 

“And I thought that if I could employ you 
to put men with me, I could have their testi- 
mony to refute any that might be manufac- 
tured against me.” 

“Our office,” Babbing said, “does n’t handle 
divorce cases.” 


194 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘T understand that. This is not a divorce 
case. I don’t want a divorce — or a separa- 
tion, either. I want to prevent it.” 

“Have your wife’s suspicions ever had any 
real grounds?” 

“None whatever.” 

“Or anything that she has misconstrued to be 
such?” 

“Well — once, last winter, I had supper at 
Rector’s with a young lady who is ... in the 
confidence of one of our big railroad men. 
For business reasons, I wanted to get a line 
on something he was doing. That sort of 
thing, you know, isn’t uncommon in Wall 
Street.” 

“And your wife learned of it?” 

“Through her brother.” 

“You ’re sure it was he?” 

“He admitted it. He saw me there. And 
he told her.” 

“There has never been any dissatisfaction 
about your handling of the estate?” 

“Except on my side. I ’ve tripled the 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 195 

value of her property and made nothing for 
myself.” 

“Any auditing?” 

“Her brother has had all my statements 
audited quarterly.” 

“How old is your son?” 

“Six.” 

“He ’s your wife’s heir?” 

“Naturally.” 

“You did not marry until after her father’s 
death?” 

“No.” 

“Yet you don’t think her brother ’s behind 
this attempt to separate you?” 

“Well, he ’s hardly that sort.” 

“What sort is he?” 

“He ’s an inoffensive kind of idler. When 
I knew him first, he used to collect birds, and 
make water-color drawings of them. He ’s 
at the head of a local Audubon society — and 
mixed up with a society for the preservation 
of the Palisades, and another for abolishing 
bill-boards — and all that sort of piffle. He ’s 


196 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


getting into politics, I hear, now — as a re- 
former.” 

“Married?” 

“No.” 

“Your wife ’s very fond of him?” 

“Yes.” 

“You’ve not separated? She’s still living 
with you?” 

“She ’s been visiting her brother — lately.” 

“Where?” 

“At the old family place — ^up the Hudson. 
Our boy ’s had trouble with his throat. The 
winters in the city are bad for him.” 

“You did n’t go with them?” 

“I ’m not on speaking terms with Van Am- 
berg.” 

“These letters have been received by her 
there?” 

“Yes. ... As a matter of fact, some of 
them came to the house, here, and I redirected 
them.” 

“I see. Well, I shall have to make a pre- 
liminary investigation before I can decide 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 

what line to work on. I can get you by tele- 
phone?” 

“What sort of preliminary investigation?” 

“The usual sort. It seems evident that this 
is a family affair, in no way connected with 
your business. And my first plan — of put- 
ting an operative in your office — will have to 
be given up.” Babbing rose. “I ’ll let you 
hear from me in a day or two.” 

Harper came to his feet reluctantly. 
“What are you going to do?” 

Babbing looked at him with a benign smile. 
“I have n’t the least idea.” 

“But I want you to put men with me, at 
once — for protection.” 

“You look as if you could take pretty good 
care of yourself. Where did you get those 
shoulders? College athletics?” 

“Yes — I don’t mean that sort of protection. 
If they have detectives — ” 

“My dear sir — ” Babbing held out his 
hand — “if there are detectives following you, 
they’ll know that you’re in this office now, 



DETECTIVE BARNEY 
and they’ll be watching for my men. We 
must be cleverer than that.” 

“Oh, I see.” Harper shook hands with 
him. “I ’ll hear from you as soon as possi- 
ble.” 

“Don’t worry. We ’ll begin at once. Go 
out this way.” 

When the door had closed on him, Babbing 
sat down at his desk again, took off his gold 
spectacles and settled back meditatively in 
his chair, tapping with his spectacles upon his 
teeth. They were small, sharp teeth, set far 
apart and very white. “Well,” he asked Bar- 
ney, “what do you make of it?” 

Barney had made practically nothing of it. 
He had not tried to. He had regarded 
Harper as a surgeon’s assistant might regard 
a prospective patient. He had not expected 
to have to pay any attention until the case came 
to the operating table. He smiled, defens- 
ively. 

“Well,” Babbing said, “you didn’t like 
him, did you?” 



THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 199* 

Barney shook his head. 

“Why not?” 

“I dunno.” 

Babbing studied him in silence a moment: 
then he rose. “I ’m disappointed in you, 
Barney,” he said, beginning to walk up and 
down the room. “You Ve got the makings 
of a good detective in you, hut you don’t seem 
to be developing. You ’ve no ‘nose,’ boy. 
And I don’t see you getting any. . . . When 
that man came in here, I had a distinct im- 
pression. Of something strongly sinister. 
That ’s why I called you in. I wanted to see 
whether you got it.” 

“I thought you were tryin’ to — to tell me 
somethin’;” Barney stammered. 

Babbing turned to him. “Oh? I see. I 
threw you off. Well, if I call you like that 
again, don’t watch me. Watch the person 
that ’s with me. I noticed that you saw his 
hand shake when he lit his cigar.” 

Barney grinned. “I did n’t think you saw 
it.” 


200 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


‘'Well, that ’s good. It shows that he 
didn’t. Why do you suppose it shook? 
He ’s in almost perfect physical condition. 
He ’s been an athlete. And evidently he 
does n’t dissipate. ... I tell him that we de- 
tectives don’t smoke — ^because we ’re often in 
situations where the trembling of a hand 
would arouse suspicion. Now, if he has come 
with anything to conceal, he ’ll immediately 
become conscious of his hand. And it ’ll 
show. Understand ?” 

Barney nodded, big-eyed. 

“When his hand shook, that alarmed him. 
When I added that the tobacco was strong 
enough to affect his nervous control of him- 
self, he let his cigar go out, did n’t he?” 

“I did n’t notice.” 

“Well, if you ’re going to be of any use to 
this office, you ’ll have to begin to open your 
eyes. You ’ll have to learn to know when a 
man ’s lying to you and when he ’s telling you 
the truth. Otherwise, you ’ll be chasing off 
on all sorts of false scents. If you had 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 201 


watched Harper, you ’d have seen that when 
I questioned him about those anonymous let- 
ters, I purposely looked him square in the eye. 
He at once became uneasily conscious of the 
facts that were concealed behind his eyes. 
And his natural impulse was to look away 
from me. He was able to control that im- 
pulse. But in controlling it he overdid it. 
He stiffened the muscles. His eyes set. 
That might be an innocent reflex in the case of 
a suspect who knew he was unjustly sus- 
pected. But Harper had no reason to sup- 
pose that I suspected him. Why should he? 
Therefore the idea of guilt must have come 
from his own thoughts. Understand?” 

Barney said he did. 

‘‘He pretended that he didn’t suspect his 
brother-in-law of sending the letters, but when 
he saw me apparently taking up that idea, his 
face — Look at me. At my eyes. I ’m 
watching you, intently. You say something 
that I secretly wished you to say. Do you 
see the change in the eye? It relaxes — almost 


202 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


imperceptibly. Watch my nostril. Now, 
I ’m listening intently. Now I hear it. Do 
you see ? When a man takes a natural breath, 
he breathes in through the front of his nose; 
the sides of the nostrils do not move. But 
when he inhales in any secret excitement — 
with gratification — See? It’s almost as if 
he smelled a pleasant odor. Besides, his 
mouth showed that he was on his guard all 
the time. He was away off normal. You 
have to learn to watch people, until you know 
what the normal is, and recognize any depar- 
ture from it instantly. Understand?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

Babbing was enjoying himself. He paced 
up and down, like an instructor expounding 
a beloved art. “Could n’t you see that he was 
writing — or planning to write — ^those letters 
himself?'^ 

“Gee!” Barney said. “What for?” 

“Well,” Babbing reflected, “if he were a 
different looking sort of man, I ’d say that he 
merely intended to make his wife believe there 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 203 


was a conspiracy of lies against him. I ’d 
say he was intending to make unjust accusa- 
tions against himself, anonymously, and then 
produce the reports of our men to show that 
the accusations were unjust. He could show, 
for example, that he could n’t have done what 
the letters said, because he was n’t in the place 
where they accused him of being, at the time 
they said. Do you understand that?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Having convinced her that he was the vic- 
tim of such a conspiracy, he could easily make 
her believe that she had been deceived about 
him in the past. And regain her sympathy. 
Eh?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Very good. But this man is too big to be 
playing that sort of game as an end in itself. 
He ’s too big. Unless I ’ve lost my eye.” 
He sat down and looked at Barney vacantly. 
His face became mildly blank in thought. 
“At college, studying medicine, he was prob- 
ably a poor boy, very ambitious. He went in 


204 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

for athletics, and distinguished himself. 
Probably became a football hero. And at- 
tracted Van Amberg, who was evidently 
sesthetic. Van Amberg’s friendship flattered 
him. And he saw its possibilities. They be- 
came chummy. Van Amberg talked about 
him at home. And invited him there. The 
girl had heard her brother speak of him. She 
was predisposed. Harper saw his chance and 
took it. But he would conceal from Van Am- 
berg the fact that he was making love to the 
sister. And having made sure of the girl, he 
would be less considerate of the brother. 
That ’s where the quarrel would come from. 
Then when the father’s death left the girl her 
money, they married. And Harper gave up 
medicine. He wanted power. It ’s in his 
face. Her money meant power. It meant a 
career. 

“Having got the girl, he shows the other 
side of him. The marriage is n’t happy. The 
brother has authority enough to keep an eye 
on Harper’s handling of his wife’s estate. 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 205 


And Harper resents it. The wife refuses to 
take his side against her brother. After 
seven or eight years of bickering, Van Am- 
berg is getting the wife away from him. 
Harper wants her back. But he wants her 
because he wants control of that estate. 
Well?’’ His gaze focused on Barney. “Is 
that your idea of the situation?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Then what do you think he ’s up to?” 

Barney shook his head. 

Babbing said: “I ’ve a notion it ’ll be in- 
teresting to find out.” He pressed a call but- 
ton. When Archibald, his office manager, ap- 
peared, he gave him Harper’s card. “This 
man,” he said, “has separated from his wife. 
He seems to he using some rather questionable 
means to bring her back to him. I want to 
find out what he ’s up to — what his final pur- 
pose is. Never mind his office. Get a line on 
his house. On his servants. On his friends. 
On his evenings. And Arch: I want to get 
telephone connection with a man named Van 


206 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


Amberg — only son of old Jacob — at his place 
up the Hudson. Right away. You can go, 
Barney.” 

Barney went, unwillingly. It was not that 
he was interested in Harper’s case, nor even 
in Babbing’s handling of it. He was simply 
so glamoured by Babbing himself that he could 
have sat listening to the Chief discourse in a 
foreign language, and been happy in the sound 
and the sight of him. And he was so single- 
minded in his infatuation that he was not 
aware how Babbing played down to him, and 
expanded before him, and enjoyed the incense 
of his boyish idealization of detectives and 
their work. He knew that Babbing liked 
him; but he was accustomed to having people 
like him; and he had learned not to presume 
on it. He returned to the labor of preparing 
his previous day’s report. 

A while later, Babbing notified him by tele- 
phone: “Be at your desk at three o’clock 
this afternoon. I want you to make another 
appearance in this Harper business.” 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 207 


II 

At ten minutes after three he was called to 
Babbing’s private office and introduced to Eu- 
gene Van Amberg as ‘‘a young man who has 
been out on the case.” And with his morn- 
ing’s lesson in his mind, Barney gave all his 
gaze to Van Amberg and took a good impres- 
sion of him, demurely. 

He was a tall, loose-shouldered, man of 
thirty-five, very drily tanned, with a philo- 
sophic long nose and a thin-lipped mouth. 
He did not actually smile at Barney, but his 
eyes softened and twinkled on him humor- 
ously, in an expression which Barney, as a 
telegraph messenger, had learned to recognize 
as the precursor of a twenty-five-cent tip. 
He was well-dressed in a negligent manner. 
He was growing bald: and it was evident that 
he had been trying to save his hair by going 
bare-headed out of doors. His scalp was sun- 
burned. 

He said to Babbing: ‘T did n’t exactly 


208 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
understand what the case was/" And he 
had a deep, but peculiarly gentle sort of 
voice. 

Babbing nodded. “No. I couldn’t be ex- 
plicit over the telephone. Sit down.” 

Van Amberg settled himself in a chair, 
leaning forward, his elbows on the chair arms, 
frankly interested in the “famous” Walter 
Babbing, but impersonally so, as a thought- 
ful spectator. 

“What I am going to tell you,” Babbing 
said very slowly, “is, of course, confidential. 
We have a client who has been blackmailed 
systematically, for some years, by a woman 
and two men in this city. As in the majority 
of such cases, he is not in a position to prose- 
cute. And we have been investigating the 
operations of the gang in the hope of finding 
a victim on whom we might successfully base 
a prosecution.” He reached a file of type- 
written reports on his desk and began to turn 
the pages. 

“In the course of this investigation we ob- 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 209 

tained evidence to indicate that the black- 
mailers had either sent, or were preparing to 
send, letters to a Mrs. P. P. Harper, — who, 
it seems, is your sister. Her address, as 
they had it in their note book, was a town 
address, wasn’t it, Barney?” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney said. 

He put aside the report. “We found that 
she was away from home, visiting you. And 
I ’phoned you in order to find out whether the 
letters received by her were sufficient for our 
purpose.” 

“To prosecute on?” 

“Yes.” 

Van Amberg shook his head. “It ’s out of 
the question.” 

“Because the letters were insufficient? Or 
because Mrs. Harper is averse to — ” 

“For both reasons. She’s been very ill. 
I ’ve intercepted the letters, and she has never 
seen them. I wouldn’t have her involved in 
a case of this kind, if it were to convict all the 
blackmailers in America.” 


210 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

‘‘Can you let me see the letters?” 

“Yes, if you promise not to involve her in 
any way.” 

“Certainly.” 

“There are only two.” He put his hand 
in an inner breast pocket. “And they seem 
absolutely futile — for purposes of blackmail.” 

Babbing nodded. “I was afraid they had 
not gone far enough.” He glanced at the let- 
ters. “I see. Yes. There ’s nothing there.” 
He returned them. He tilted himself back 
in his swivel chair, cheerfully at his ease, as 
if the important part of the interview were 
over. And with one dimpled hand playing 
with the paper knife on his desk, and the other 
hooked into his watch pocket by the thumb, 
he continued chattily: “These people have 
been working with a dishonest lawyer in this 
way: the woman ’s in a position to hear most 
of the gossip of what our newspapers call ‘the 
smart set,’ and as soon as she gets a rumor of 
any marital difficulties she sends such letters 
as yours to the aggrieved party, anonymously. 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 211 

She follows them with a letter to the effect that 
the dishonest lawyer has evidence to prove 
the anonymous accusations. The lawyer al- 
most invariably gets the case. He betrays his 
client into the hands of the blackmailers, who 
proceed to involve the client in a criminal con- 
spiracy to manufacture evidence for the di- 
vorce proceedings: and when the divorce has 
been obtained, the client finds himself — or her- 
self — threatened with exposure, and compelled 
to pay for silence. They were evidently 
working towards some such conclusion with 
your sister.” 

Van Amberg straightened up. “They ’ll 
betray my sister into no such conspiracy.” 

“No,” Babbing agreed. “I thought it un- 
likely. They have an alternative plan, how- 
ever.” 

“An alternative?” 

“Mrs. Harper, you say, is very ill?” 

“She has been. Yes. She ’s had what was 
supposed to be malaria. We find it was 
peripatetic typhoid.” 


212 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


“And her son?” 

“Nothing whatever the matter with him.” 

“But if anything happened to his mother 
he would be her sole heir, wouldn’t he?” 

“Yes.” 

“And being a minor, his father would be 
his guardian?” 

“Until a few days ago, yes. My sister has 
recently made a new disposition of her estate.” 

“Making you the boy’s guardian?” 

“Yes.” 

“Does his father know this?” 

“No. But I don’t see — ” 

“Mr. Van Amberg,” Babbing interrupted, 
“you have wisely intercepted the letters that 
came to your sister. I would advise you, now, 
to let it be generally known that in the event 
of your sister’s death, you will be her son’s 
guardian and her estate will be in your hands. 
That will protect her husband from blackmail 
and save him from being betrayed — as she 
might have been — in to the hands of these 
criminals.” 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 213 

Van Amberg was frowning at him, puzzled. 
‘T don’t understand you.” 

‘Tt is n’t necessary that you should.” Bab- 
bing rose to end the interview, smihng. ‘T ’m 
very much obliged to you for bringing me 
your letters. I think I can guarantee that 
you ’ll not receive any more. These people 
‘fish in troubled waters,’ as the saying is. 
You ’ve not settled the trouble — but you ’ve 
removed the fish.” 

“How so?” 

Babbing shook hands with him. “Think it 
over. If I ’m wrong — and you continue to 
be annoyed — let me know. I ’ll be glad to 
return the compliment of your assistance, and 
help you all I can. Barney, show Mr. Van 
Amberg the way to the hall.” 

“Well,” Van Amberg said, obviously wor- 
ried, “I ’m altogether in the dark, but I ’ll take 
your word for it.” 

“This way, sir,” Barney put in. 

Van Amberg drifted out, piloted by Bar- 
ney, who opened and closed the doors for him. 


214 i DETECTIVE BARNEY 
They did not speak. Van Amberg was evi- 
dently busy with the mystifications in which 
Babbing had involved him; and Barney was 
preparing himself for the examination which 
he expected to face when he returned to Bab- 
bing’s desk. He found the Chief saying to 
Archibald : “He can get in to fix the electric 
lights. Plant it by telephone first. Have 
him search for evidences of experiments in 
germ cultures. Look at his books, too. 
Medical books. Go ahead.” 

Archibald went out. Barney waited. 
Babbing looked at him over his glasses. 
“Well, anything wrong with Van Am- 
berg?” 

“I didn’t see anything, Chief?” 

“Did you notice that he said there was noth- 
ing whatever the matter with his nephew?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Do you remember what Harper said about 
the boy?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“What was it?” 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 215 

“That they ’d took him away ’cause he had a 
sore t’roat.” 

Babbing took off his glasses, surprised. 
“Why did you remember that? Because it 
was a boy?” 

Barney grinned. “I Ve had sore t’roats. 
They never took me up the Hudson.” 

“I see. Envy, eh? Well, why do you sup- 
pose Harper said his son was sick when he 
wasn’t — and said nothing about his wife, 
when she was?'' 

Barney was silent. 

Babbing returned to the papers on his desk. 
“I ’ll show you before this time, to-morrow. 
Run along, now. I ’ll not need you on this 
case again till Harper comes.” 

Barney went out as importantly as if he had 
been appointed consulting expert to the head 
of the Babbing Bureau. Almost immediately 
afterward, he was sent with an older operative 
to help “tail” a valet who was suspected of 
stealing from his employer; and he forgot 
Harper and the anonymous letters in the ex- 


216 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


citement of tracking his man up and down 
Broadway, in and out of hotels, on and off 
street cars, through crowds and along de- 
serted side streets, to the pawnshop where the 
suspect had been disposing of his loot. By the 
time that the valet was on his way to the police 
station, Barney was sound asleep in his bed 
at home, tucked in by his mother. And it 
was not till he arrived at the Babbing Bureau 
next morning that he remembered Harper. 
There was a note on his desk: “Chief will 
call you to his office about ten.” 

He had no report to write on the valet’s 
case; the other operative was attending to 
that ; and he sat down with a yesterday’s news- 
paper to enjoy the “comics.” On the wall be- 
hind him there was hanging a dummy revolver 
that a convict had carved out of wood with a 
jack-knife and used to “break jail.” Barney 
had long since exhausted his awed interest in 
it. There were photographs of criminals 
stuck up here and there — clippings from 
newspapers, old cartoons of Babbing, finger 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 217 

print records and a miscellany of odd “ex- 
hibits” preserved by the men who used the 
ofBce. Barney had come to accept them as the 
cub accepts the curiosities of the reporters’ 
room. He was growing blase. It took the 
expected summons from Babbing to give him 
the thrill of a call from the editor. 

As soon as he entered Babbing’s door, the 
detective said: “I understood you to report 
that no one was shadowing Mr. Harper.” 

Harper was sitting there, massively com- 
posed. 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Mr. Harper tells me,” Babbing said, “that 
a detective got into his house yesterday, dis- 
guised as an electrician, on the pretext of re- 
newing the light bulbs.” 

“I did n’t cover the house,” Barney replied. 

“He was detailed,” Babbing explained, “to 
see whose men were following you on the 
street. He found no one at it.” 

“I think you ’d better put a man on the 
job,” Harper grumbled. 


218 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

‘T don’t think you’ll feel that way when 
you hear his report. I want to go over it with 
you. Sit down, Barney.” 

Barney sat down, alertly. 

“He finds,” Babbing said, glancing over his 
typewritten sheets, “that the anonymous let- 
ters could not have come from Mr. Van Am- 
herg.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because Van Amberg intercepted them 
before they reached your wife. She has 
never received them.” 

Harper turned on Barney. “How do you 
know that?” 

Barney nodded to the paper in Babbing’s 
hands, as if it contained the answer. 

“It does n’t matter how we know it,” Bab- 
bing said. “It ’s a fact.” 

Harper glanced suspiciously from one to 
the other. The boy’s face was an ingenuous 
mask. Babbing’s expression was almost as 
innocent, but there was a keenness in his color- 
less eyes. He tapped the typewritten pages. 


THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 21d 
‘‘He also reports/’ he said, “that you ’re prob- 
ably sending these anonymous letters your- 
self.” 

Harper took it without a quiver. He 
looked from Babbing to the papers on his desk. 
From the papers, he looked down at the hat 
in his hands. “Well,” he said, rising, “I ’ve 
no time to waste on this sort of nonsense.” 

“You ’re not wasting it,” Babbing assured 
him. “You ’re employing it very profitably. 
Your wife has been ill. With typhoid fever. 
She ’s recovering. But she has made a will . 
appointing her brother trustee of her estate — 
in the event of her death — ^till her son comes of 
age.” 

“What ’s that got to do with youV" 

“Nothing whatever,” Babbing iSaid. “But 
a great deal to do with you. As long as she 
lives, I understand, you ’ll continue in your 
present position. But if she dies, you see, 
you ’ll lose it.” 

Harper was very coolly pale, and he con- 
fronted Babbing’s critical scrutiny with a firm 


220 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
scowl. ‘‘What the devil are you trying to in- 
sinuate?” 

“That you Ve been very wise in making a 
study of the typhoid bacillus. No doubt 
you ’re experimenting to produce the anti- 
toxin. Eh?” 

Harper sat down again, quickly. He 
leaned forward, with his jaw set. “You 
can’t say a thing like that to me^ and get 

away with it. Now you, what do you 

mean?” 

Babbing smiled at him, in ironical silence, 
contemptuously. “I ’ve been in this game for 
forty years. Did you think that you could 
sit into it, for the first time in your life, and 
make a fool of me? Barney, show this crook 
the quickest way to the hall.” He jerked a 
nod in the direction of the door. He added, 
as he dipped his pen: “I ’ll send you my bill 
as soon as my men report their expenses.” 

“Blackmail, eh?” Harper said, hoarsely. 

Babbing replied, in the voice of abstraction: 
“Worse than that. Ruin, if you don’t be- 


You'll troad J?ently for tlio rest of your days, you sneakinp: parasite 







Kc al' SyUiiii^ 


| m 

Js fi JKa 

> Sm 1 


r 














I^B 












V ^ 




✓ 


y 

4 



THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS 223 

have yourself. I have n’t enough evidence to 
convince a jury, perhaps, but I ’ve enough to 
satisfy Eugene Van Amberg and his sister.” 
He was signing his letters. “You ’ll tread 
gently for the rest of your days, you sneaking 
parasite. And if you so much as put a toe 
outside the straight path, I ’ll have you flung 
into the Broad Street gutters like a drunken 
bum. You can go.” 

“This way,” Barney said, and threw the 
door open. 

Harper hesitated, tugging his hat down on 
his forehead in a manner at once beaten and 
defiant. He opened his mouth to speak, 
thought better of it, and bit his teeth together 
again. As he shouldered past Barney, his 
jaw muscles were swollen in his cheek as if 
he had taken a bull-dog grip on his rage and 
his disappointment. 

Barney watched him down the hall. When 
he closed the door and returned to Babbing, 
he found the Chief still busily writing. 

“Go back to your work,” he said, without 


224 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
stopping his pen. “And keep your mouth 
shut.” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney promised, just as con- 
fidently as if he were quite clear what it had 
all been about. “I won’t have to write any 
other report, will I?” 

“Other than whut?” 

He answered, with a straight face: “Other 
than the one you read to Harper.” 

Babbing adjusted his glasses and blotted 
his signature. “No,” he said, in the game, 
“I think that one covers your end of it.” 

And Barney went out, grinning cheerfully, 
pleased with himself, pleased with Babbing, 
but chiefly pleased because he thought he had 
outwitted the typewriter. 


VI 


BAENEY AND KING LEAR 
I 

B arney had spent his day around the 
General Post Office waiting to pick up 
a suspect, whom he had never seen, and follow 
him — he did not know whither — so as to get 
evidence of he did not know what. He had 
had his instructions and a photograph; that 
was all; and he had not asked anything more. 
He was not curious. He was. becoming 
highly professional. He did not even worry 
over the fact that he had failed to catch his 
man. And having been relieved by another 
member of Babbing’s staff, he was on his way 
home to his supper, now, with a free mind. 
But if you except that he was tired and 

hungry and expecting a warm meal and a soft 

m 


226 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


bed, he was not looking forward to his home- 
coming with any eager anticipation. Home, 
of course, should be the place where a working 
man may talk of himself and his day inex- 
haustibly, with the assurance of a sympathetic 
hearing. It was just this credulous ear of in- 
terest that Barney knew he would not find. 

On the first day of his work with Babbing, 
he had told his mother that he had been en- 
gaged as an office boy — ^because he was afraid 
that she might object to his being a detective. 
Later, when he was forced to tell her the truth, 
he had wound his way into his confession with 
such unconvincing circumlocution, and he had 
so guiltily beclouded the point when he came 
to it, that she had accepted his story in a large 
silence that evidently covered a multitude of 
thoughts. Then he began to come home full 
of enthusiastic accounts of his daily exploits; 
and the more calmly she received them, the 
more amazing he made them. Once or twice, 
when he was romancing, she interrupted him 
to talk to his sister Annie. But she never ex- 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 227 

pressed any doubts of his stories to the boy 
himself. She was a wise woman. The whole 
neighborhood knew her to be such; and she 
had gained the reputation by her ability to 
keep her opinion of people to herself. 

Barney might never have suspected her, if 
he had not become a detective. In his social 
set, a boy is so busy concealing the guilty 
secrets of his conscience from his elders that 
he has no time to develop his own perspicacity. 
He is so diligent in hiding that he does not 
sharpen his eyes for what others have hidden. 
But after Babbing had lectured him, whim- 
sically, on the necessity of knowing when a 
man was lying to him, he had begun to watch 
and study the utterances he met with. And 
suddenly he found that he could guess what 
people were thinking. In the ordinary course 
of growth, he would have acquired the faculty 
imperceptibly, by the slow process of experi- 
ence. It came to him, now, in a startling 
illumination. 

And the first thing it showed him was his 


228 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

own lack of credit in his mother’s mind. He 
discovered, beneath her silence, an incredulity 
like a bottomless pit, into which he had been 
pouring his confidences. Her proud opinion 
of him — which he had built up for himself on 
her supposed behef in his exploits — collapsed 
into that chasm. He had thought himself his 
mother’s right-hand man. He had been jeal- 
ous of his sister Annie. His mother had al- 
ways appeared to slight the girl in his favor, 
and to give him the place in her esteem 
to which his masculine superiority entitled 
him. Imagine the disillusionment of discov- 
ering that his mother had been protecting him 
from Annie — that she had been slighting the 
girl in order to preserve an appearance of 
equilibrium in her maternal affection — that 
she had assumed her partiality for him out of 
pity for his inferiority to his sister. Imagine 
the feelings of an anti-suffragist who learns 
that to Mother Nature the female is the more 
important sex. 

It had taken him a week to find out where 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 229 

he stood and convince himself that he was not 
mistaken. He had sulked — and been ig- 
nored. He had boasted, and his self-asser- 
tion had been accepted in a silence that de- 
feated him. He could not take his mother to 
the Babbing Bureau to convince her that he 
had not greatly exaggerated his importance 
there. And certainly there was no way in 
which he could bring the Babbing Bureau to 
her. If the hero of ‘‘The Boy Pirate” had 
come home to be spanked for playing hookey 
and telling lies to excuse his truancy, the situa- 
tion might have had a parallel in Barney’s 
mind. Nothing less bathetic could equal it. 

His mother kept a furnished lodging-house 
in Hudson Street, and he came up the worn 
sandstone steps to her blistered colonial door, 
with as little alacrity as if he were still a tele- 
graph boy delivering a message. His sister 
Annie answered bis ring. “Oh, it ’s you,” she 
said ; and he thought she said it disparagingly. 
He did not reply to her. He went down the 
shabby hall to the back stairs and descended 


230 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

them to the basement, where an odor of cook- 
ing flattered his nostrils. He heard old Con 
Cooney’s voice, and understood that their 
neighbor had dropped in again for supper. 
He liked Cooney — ^because Cooney liked him 
— and the presence of another man in the 
house seemed somehow to mitigate the fem- 
inine conspiracy to belittle him. 

Mrs. Cook, having rented all her upper 
floors, housed her family in three rooms in the 
basement ; and they had their meals in the big 
old-fashioned kitchen, on an oilcloth-covered 
table, beside a cookstove that stood in an 
arched niche of brick in the chimney wall. 
Barney smelled the potato cakes in the oven 
as he hung up his hat in the lower hall. He 
did not get the subtler fragrance of clam chow- 
der till he came into the room. When old 
Cooney said heartily ‘‘How are ye, boy?” he 
answered “Fine an’ dandy,” with a smile. It 
was the smile of an expectant stomach. 

His mother rose to get his soup plate from 
the warming shelf, but she merely looked her 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 231 


greeting in a glance of solicitude that saw him 
tired and hungry. Any demonstration of af- 
fection from her would have seemed hypocriti- 
cal. Cooney said ‘‘That ’ll stick to yer ribs,” 
as she put a steaming plate of chowder before 
Barney. He replied “Sure, Mike,” and 
grinned. 

It was a chowder as thick as an Irish stew — 
a savory suttee of indistinguishable vegetables 
that had been immolated at the obsequies of 
the clam, and now, in the ascending steam, 
gave up their essential souls to assist his trans- 
lation into glory. Like an aromatic music, it 
soothed Barney with a vague strengthening 
of spirit that was at once insatiable and con- 
tented. He opened his moist lips to the first 
spoonful, and it sank to the seat of a satisfac- 
tion that was too deep to be lifted even by 
a sigh. He hunched himself over that seduc- 
tive distillation, drinking a steady stream of 
spoonfuls, gazing into it hypnotically, breath- 
ing it, brooding on it, lost in it. The conversa- 
tion went on above his devotional, bowed head. 


232 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

The others had arrived at the potato cakes. 

They could talk. 

They were talking of Cooney’s domestic af- 
fairs. He was a widower, with two married 
daughters, to each of whom, on the day of 
her marriage, he had given a house. ‘‘Why 
should I be keepin’ thim waitin’ fer my fun’- 
ral,” he said, “to get their bit o’ prope’ty? 
They need it more now.” It was all he had — 
those two houses. They represented the 
savings of a lifetime of trucking. He had 
sold his teams and his trucks to pay oflf the 
last instalment of mortgage when he retired. 

He had a ruddy old face — the ruddier by 
contrast with the whiteness of his hair. It 
was a face of kindly philosophy growing 
senile. He had always had the name of be- 
ing “kind o’ simple”; and there was this sim- 
plicity in his confessing to Mrs. Cook, at her 
supper table, that he was worried out of his 
sleep because his youngest daughter, with 
whom he was living, had made up her mind 
to give up renting rooms, to sell her house, and 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 233 


move into a flat. “It ’s been hard times, as ye 
know, m’am,” he explained, “gettin’ rooms 
rented hereabouts since thim subways an’ tun- 
nels an’ all was digged. But what w’ud I be 
doin’ in a flat?” 

Mrs. Cook attempted to cheer him by help- 
ing him to another potato cake. It distracted 
him at least. He split it with his knife, spread 
the halves with lumps of butter and closed 
them together on that melting secret, to ab- 
sorb it tenderly. 

Barney said, in the silence: “Why don’t 
you get about ten ton o’ coal an’ shoot it into 
her cellar?” 

Cooney looked up from his cake. “What 
good ’ud that do, d’ ye think?” 

“She ’d never move out an’ leave it, would 
she?” 

“Niver!” He laid down his knife and fork. 
“Boy! Ye’re a wunnder! How did y’ iver 
think o’ that, now?” 

Barney nodded, with his eyes on his chow- 
der, as if to say “Oh, I know a thing er two, 


234 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

even if some people don't think so.” As a 
matter of fact, he had once heard of a man 
using a load of coal to anchor his wife when 
she talked of moving. 

Annie piped up: ‘T don’t see that that ^ A 
make any difference.” 

“Wouldn’t it then,” Mrs. Cook snubbed 
her. “That shows all you know about it.” 

Annie was used to snubs. She went to the 
oven for Barney’s plate of potato cakes, un- 
resentful. His mother was pouring his tea. 

“It ’ud do the trick,” Cooney said. “It 
w'ud that. It ’s a great contrivance. It is 
surely.” He added, in a lower tone, to him- 
self and his food: “But where ’d I get the 
money fer it?” 

Mrs. Cook put down her tea-pot with a 
hump. “Have you given all of it over to 
them girls?” 

“Yes ’m,” Cooney admitted. 

“Have you kep’ none of it fer yurself?” 

He blinked at her, under his shaggy eye- 
brows, guiltily apologetic. “No’m,” he said. 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 235 


Arid to Barney, looking from one to the other, 
several things were clear. 

It was clear that Cooney, having made him- 
self dependent on his children, was being 
housed with ingratitude; that was why he 
looked apologetic; he was ashamed of them 
before her. And he had been trying to main- 
tain some show of being independent of their 
bounty, by going about for his meals; that 
was why he had been dropping in for supper 
so frequently with Mrs. Cook. And his 
praise of her cooking had not been disinter- 
ested; that was why he looked guilty; he saw 
that she suspected it. 

Mrs. Cook, shrewd and kindly, made no 
comment on the situation. She maintained a 
receptive silence that drew him out like a 
vacuum pump. In a few minutes he was giv- 
ing up his story, in hints and evasions, piece- 
meal, out of all sequence of time and incident, 
and with no right understanding himself of 
how it had happened or who had been to blame. 
Barney ate and listened. 


236 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

The story was new to him, though it y;^as 
as old as King Lear. Cooney had deeded a 
house to his elder daughter when she married 
Lieutenant Buntz of the fire department; and 
they had all lived together^ renting the parlor 
floor, the younger daughter helping to do the 
house-work. When this younger daughter 
married a machinist, Cooney could no less 
than give her the other house, where she too 
followed the custom of the street by letting 
her vacant floors. He had remained with the 
older girl, who kept him in clothes and to- 
bacco — ^and pocket money for an occasional 
nip. She had begrudged him nothing, though 
she had hinted, after Kathleen’s marriage, that 
the sister might be doing something for him, 
too. 

‘Tt was Buntz’s notion, that,” old Cooney 
said. “He ’s nothin’ but a poor furriner, y’ 
understand, m’am. He ’s got no right feelin’s 
whativer.” 

Then the hard times struck the quarter, and 
so many of Mrs. Buntz’s rooms were empty for 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 237 

a whole summer that she had no money for 
her dad. The winter brought some return 
of prosperity, but not for him. He had all 
he could eat and a comfortable room, but 
Buntz had evidently persuaded his wife that 
her father’s spending money ought to come 
from the other daughter; and they let him go 
shabby, with empty pockets and a cold pipe. 
He left them — after a quarrel with Buntz. 

‘‘He ’s a durty little furriner,” he explained 
to Mrs. Cook. “They ’re the currse o’ the 
country, as ye know, ma’m — thim furriners. 
They ’ve got no right to marry dacint Amuri- 
cans. There ought to be a law agin it.” 

Kathleen’s man, the machinist, was the 
proper sort; and they had received him with 
a sympathy that encouraged his grievance and 
increased his ill-will against Buntz. But the 
machinist was chronically out of work, and 
Kathleen was no such manager as her sister; 
and though Cooney and the husband made 
themselves useful around the house, and 
shared their tobacco when they had any — and 


238 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

were convivial together when they could raise 
the price of a glass — old Cooney’s condition 
was not so much better than it had been at the 
Buntz’s. Affairs were soon comphcated by 
the fact that Kathleen became exasperated at 
her husband’s idleness and accused him, before 
her father, of being willing to live on the rent 
of the rooms instead of working for himself. 
Cooney was a man of peace. He avoided tak- 
ing sides in the quarrel. But he was drawn 
into it by the husband’s retort that the house 
was not hers anyway, but her father’s — and 
by the girl’s accusation that Cooney was en- 
couraging the husband to loaf. Then she 
went to her sister and demanded that some 
just arrangement should be made by which 
one of them could board their father and the 
other make him an allowance ; and Mrs. Buntz 
replied that she had always been willing to 
board him and would do so any time that he 
would come back to her. Cooney declared 
that he would starve first. Kathleen scolded 
him. He accused her of ingratitude. 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 239 

Things went rapidly from bad to worse. It 
was a cat and dog’s life entirely. And at last 
Kathleen, in a determined revolt against the 
domestic situation, put the house in an agent’s 
hands for sale, and started out to look for a 
small flat in which she could live economically 
on her bit of money and make it impossible for 
her relatives to ‘‘impose” on her any longer. 

“Oh, now,” Mrs. Cook consoled the old 
man, “people has to squabble. It gives them 
somethin’ t’ occupy their minds. It makes 
life int’restin’ — a good hot quar’l. You 
must n’t take it so to heart.” 

“’Tain’t that, m’am,” he said pathetically, 
“but between ’em I ’ll soon be on the streets. 
They neither av thim wants me.” 

“Well, that ’s the way o’ nature, Mr. Coo- 
ney.” She poured him the last cup of tea. 
“It ain’t provided that a parent should be 
dependin’ to his young ones. Those gurls ’ll 
be sweet enough to their own childurn — an’ 
like as not they ’ll get the same dose they ’re 
givin’ you. It ’s the wisdom o’ God. If we 


240 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


was all as crazy about our parents as they are 
about us, we ’d none of us be leavin’ home to 
marry, an’ there ’d soon be no childurn in the 
world at all. That ’d never do. Never. 
You mustn’t expect it, man.” 

‘T don’t, m’am,” poor Cooney defended 
himself. “All I wanted of them was a corner 
be the fire, in the houses I gave thim.” 

“Well, say,” Barney cut in, “if you had a 
couple thousan’ dollars — er so — in the bank, 
it’d make a change, wouldn’t it?” 

“Make a change, lad?” 

“Yes. They’d like y’ a lot more if you 
had somethin’ to make it worth while, eh?” 

Cooney rubbed his forehead. “What ’s 
that? Say that ag’in.” 

“It ’s because you ’ve got nuthin’ more to 
give them — isn’t it? That’s why they’re so 
snooty?” 

“Boy,” he confessed, “I suppose ’tis so, but 
I take shame to think it.” 

“Well, then,” Barney said, “if you c’n keep 
yer mouth shut, I c’n put somethin’ over.” 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 241 

‘‘Barney,” his mother cried, “if you talk so 
to yer elders, I ’ll box yer ears.” 

He turned to her impatiently. “Aw, hoF 
on a shake, mom. I ’m talkin’ bus’ness. We 
c’n square this whole blame thing with a little 
plant.” 

The puzzled Cooney asked: “What kind 
av a plant?” 

“A rubber plant,” Barney answered cockily. 
“Gum shoe. The kind they grow down at 
the oflBce. Leave it to me. I ’ll show y’ a 
sample to-morrah.” He held out his plate to 
Annie. “Gi’ me another cake,” he ordered 
her. 

“You ’ll make yerself sick,” she said. 

“I ’d sooner be sick than hungry. Hurry 
up.” 

He explained to Cooney: “That coal 
would Ve done the trick, would n’t it? Well, 
that was a plant. See? Leave it to me.” 
He swept them all with a Napoleonic eye. 
“An’ you ’ll keep quiet about it — all of you — 
er you ’ll crab the whole game.” 


242 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

Annie asserted her independence feebly by 
taking her own time with the cakes. His 
mother opened her lips to reply to him — and 
closed them again. But what they both con- 
cealed in the backs of their minds was visible 
in Cooney’s admiring regard: Barney was on 
the way to come into his own with that family. 

II 

He refused to say anything more about his 
plant until he could complete his preparations 
for it, and those preparations required a word 
from Babbing. 

He put in his request for an interview 
with the Chief early on the following morn- 
ing; but he did not get an invitation to the 
private office until the afternoon, when Bab- 
bing, after his morning’s work and a milk- 
and-salad luncheon, was smoking the one cigar 
that he allowed himself daily. It was sup- 
posed, among his men, that he devoted this 
interval of nicotine to scheming out the vari- 
ous stratagems by which he solved his cases; 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 243 


and Barney entered the sanctum of cerebra- 
tion with apologetic misgivings for the request 
he wished to make. 

As a matter of fact, Babbing had one of 
those minds that never consciously apply 
themselves to thought — that start like an 
engine when the mechanical load is thrown on, 
and work best when the necessity is pressing. 
He merely smoked a cigar as a sort of siesta, 
while his luncheon was “settling.” And he 
received Barney in the best of post-prandial 
moods, behind a cloud of tobacco smoke, at 
his ease in his swivel chair, mildly quizzical. 
“Well, what ’s worrying youV" 

Barney rose, at once, to his humor. He re- 
plied, like a client: “I got a case ’at I want 
to see y’ about, Mr. Babbing.” 

“Good. Sit down. What is it?” 

Barney sat down, as part of the joke. “I 
want to get a bunch o’ phoney money to make 
a plant fer a fullah.” 

“Uh-huh.” Babbing received it as if it 
were a request for a postage stamp, almost 


244 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

absent-mindedly, being engaged in flicking 
the ash from his cigar. “What are you go- 
ing to do with it?” 

Barney admired the duplicity of his Chief’s 
manner the more because he saw through it. 
“I want to — to kind o’ help him out of a hole. 
It ’s this way, Chief.” And he began Coo- 
ney’s story, confusedly, struggling to avoid 
the slang to which Babbing objected. As he 
got further in his narrative, he forgot about 
the slang, and Babbing listened to him, twink- 
ling. The sunlight, from the window at Bab- 
bing’s back, made a luminous obscuring cloud 
of the tobacco smoke before the detective’s 
face; and when Babbing snorted and coughed, 
Barney supposed that it was the smoke that 
choked him. “So I dopes it out,” said Bar- 
ney, “that if I could get a hold of a bunch o’ 
fake money, I could make a kind o’ plant with 
th’ ol’ guy, an’ have some one go an’ borry a 
sackful off him — some way so ’s his fam’ly ’d 
get hep — an’ then they ’d Agger he ’d got a 
bar’l o’ sugar stowed away some’rs — an’ he ’d 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 245 


be as pop’lar ’s Santy Claus, all right, with the 
whole outfit. Don’t you think so. Chief?” 

Babbing waved aside the tobacco smoke and 
leaned forward. He was smihng. “Bar- 
ney,” he said, “did you ever read Shake- 
speare?” 

“No, sir,” Barney grinned. 

“I thought you were trying to rewrite him. 
You ’re making comedy out of King Lear.” 

“King Who?” 

“Never mind. I see glimmerings of intelli- 
gence in you, at last. You ’re beginning to 
think like a detective.” 

“Yes, sir,” Barney said modestly. 

“Well, let us see, now,” Babbing reflected. 
“Your idea is that if Cooney’s daughters 
thought he still had money, they ’d be more 
considerate of him, eh? With a hvely sense 
of favors to come.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“And how long do you think they ’d be will- 
ing to wait cheerfully for those favors?” 

“Well, gee—” 


246 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

‘‘And can you imagine those girls giving 
him money to spend if they thought he had 
plenty in the bank?” 

“Mebbe they’d let on they didn’t know 
about it?” 

“Yes. That ‘maybe’ has spoiled a lot of 
good-looking plants. Is Cooney a convincing 
liar?” 

Barney shook his head. 

“Is he the sort of man who ’d have money 
in the bank and keep quiet about it?” 

“I guess—” 

“In fact you know he ’s not, don’t you?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Well, then, what are you going to do about 
it? Your plant ’s so full of holes it would 
collapse in a week.” 

Barney looked down at his feet. He 
rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. 
He frowned thoughtfully. “Well, I guess 
that ’s all there is to it.” 

“No. Not altogether.” Babbing swung 
around to look out the window, “You ’ve 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 247 

started right. Have the Buntzes a telephone 
in the house?” 

“I— I don’ know.” 

“Find that out. Wait a minute. See 
Cooney to-night and explain to him that he 
has a paid-up policy for five-thousand dol- 
lars — say in the Calabrian Life. That ’s a 
foreign company that doesn’t exist. Their 
agent has a desk in 1047.” (Room 1047 was 
one of the imlabeled operatives’ rooms of the 
Babbing Detective Bureau.) “This pohcy 
has been made out in favor of Cooney’s two 
daughters, understand? They’d get five 
thousand dollars between them when he died. 
But he ’s been so pinched for money that he 
wants to cash in the policy right away. And 
the agent of the Calabrian Life can only offer 
him fifteen hundred dollars for it. Do you 
get that?” 

“Sure Mi — Yes, sir.” 

“Good. As soon as you have Cooney 
ready, we ’ll telephone to Buntz’s — or have 
Fisher drop in there, if they have n’t a ’phone 


248 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


— and ask for Cooney, and let it slip that he 
wants to see the old man about a paid-up 
policy. That ’ll start the Buntzes in the di- 
rection we want them to move. Then you 
can have Fisher, as agent of the insurance 
company, write a letter to Cooney telling him 
that the cash value of the policy is only fifteen 
hundred dollars. And Cooney can consult the 
machinist about the letter. Understand? If 
the machinist comes to 1047, Fisher can take 
care of him. Arrange for that.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Then we ’ll have Lear’s two daughters up 
against the proposition that if they drive their 
father out on the street, he ’ll have to sell his 
policy and they ’ll lose five thousand by it. 
And unless I ’m a false prophet, each one ’ll 
begin trying to edge the other out of the old 
man’s affections, so as to get the whole five 
thousand for herself. And Mr. Cooney will 
be happy as long as he can keep his secret.” 

“Gee!” Barney said, “that’s a peach.” 

“Good. I ’m glad you like it. Go ahead. 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 249 

now, and let me see you pull it off. I ’ll 
’phone Fisher to help you.” 

Barney hesitated. “He won’t be able to 
pay us a cent, Chief — Cooney won’t.” 

Babbing dropped his cigar butt in the cus- 
pidor and reached for his desk ’phone. “Tell 
him I ’m doing this for him as a fellow-mem- 
ber of the International Brotherhood of Male 
Parents. I ’m a father myself. If he wants 
to, he can leave directions in his will that we ’re 
to be paid out of his life insurance after he 
dies. . . . Hello. Put Fisher on here.” 
He added to Barney, his bps twitching: 
“I ’d like to live long enough to interview the 
daughters, when they come to 1047 to claim 
that insurance money. Run along, now, and 
get busy.” 

Barney ran. He found that the Buntzes 
had a telephone — for the convenience of their 
lodgers — and he helped Fisher prepare his 
letter as agent of the life insurance company. 
Fisher improved on the plant. Having an ar- 
tistic conscience, he was not satisfied until he 


250 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
had hunted up a fraudulent insurance policy 
that had come into the office files in connec- 
tion with a swindle long since prosecuted ; and 
he altered the policy to insure Cooney for five 
thousand dollars, and he wrote his own name 
and office address on it as agent of the com- 
pany. 

“Now, young man,” he said, “there ’s a 
perfectly good forgery that ’ll land me in 
trouble if Cooney tries to borrow on it. You 
be careful who sees that document, and get it 
back to me as soon as they ’ve swallowed it.” 

“Leave it to me,” Barney gloated. “It ’s 
a pippin. It ’ll make th’ ol’ geezer feel he ’s 
goin’ to die rich.” 

He got an interview with Cooney after sup- 
per that evening, in a beer-sour room off 
Dolan’s bar; and he explained the plant to the 
bewildered old man over and over, till Coo- 
ney’s face was bright with understanding. 
“Saints in Hiven,” he kept muttering to him- 
self, at admiring intervals. “The little divel! 
Look at that, wud ye! Don’t that beat the 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 251 

Dutch ! Who ’d ’a’ thought av that ! Faith, 
he ’s the wunder av the wurrld!” 

Barney carried himself as if he were all of 
that. “Don’t you open yer mouth, now, to 
nobody,” he ordered, “er you ’ll ditch the 
whole frame-up. Just show the letter to ’em 
— when it comes to-morrah — an’ if they want 
to see the policy let ’em have a squint at it. 
I got to have it back again to-morrah night, 
mind.” 

Cooney put the paper in his inside pocket 
and buttoned his coat over it, reliably. 
“Trust me, boy. Trust me.” 

“Well, I don’t trust you much,” Barney 
assured him cheekily, “but the plant ’s so 
good, you ’ll have yer own time crabbin’ it. 
Go ahead,” he concluded, in Babbing’s best 
manner, “an’ don’t try to lie too glib ; that ’s 
all. Let them do their own thinkin’. I ’ll 
see you here on my way home to supper, to- 
morrah, eh?” 

“Ye will that.” He pulled down his hat 
on his eyes, like a conspirator. “Trust me. 


252 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

boy. Trust me. I ’m no such fool as ye ’d 

think.” 


Ill 

On the following evening, when Barney en- 
tered the room again, there he was in the dusk, 
smiling craftily, with triumph in his face. 
He had the policy with him, and he reported 
that it had already begun to do its perfect 
work. His daughter Kathleen had been im- 
mediately indignant with him for thinking of 
accepting fifteen hundred dollars for a five- 
thousand-dollar policy. ‘Tt ’s a robbery,” she 
had cried. “Don’t you do it, paw.” And 
when Cooney argued that he needed the 
money, she replied: “We may need money, 
but we don’t need it so bad that we ’ll sell five 
thousand dollars for fifteen hundred. We ’ll 
stick it out, together. I ain’t been feelin’ well, 
an’ this big house has got on my nerves, but 
I ’ll drop dead in my tracks before I ’ll let 
that old insurance company cheat us that 
way.” 



Mrs. Buntz was soon as indignant as her sister. She read the 
policy aloud — every word of it — with fine conviction 








BAKNEY AND KING LEAR 255 


They were still discussing the matter when 
Mrs. Buntz dropped in, coolly, to tell her 
father that an insurance agent had telephoned 
about some insurance policy, early that morn- 
ing. She had been so busy all day that she 
had not been able to come over before. Be- 
sides, she thought there must have been some 
mistake. 

Well, there had not been. Not any. The 
insurance company was trying to persuade 
their innocent father to take fifteen hundred 
dollars for a five-thousand-dollar policy. A 
paid-up policy in favor of his two daughters, 
payable after his death! 

Mrs. Buntz was soon as indignant as her 
sister. She read the policy aloud — every 
word of it — ^with fine conviction; and she fol- 
lowed it with the agent’s letter, sarcastically, 
rather through the nose. ‘‘That,” she said, 
“was written by a thief.” 

It was she who thought to ask why they 
had never heard of the policy before. Coo- 
ney mumbled, “I ’d fergot about it, gurl. 


250 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
’T was all paid up, years since.” Mrs. Buntz 
said: “There now! It’s a good thing you 
have us to look after you, er you ’d be in a nice 
way. I was just thinkin’ to-day that when 
Kathleen sells her house — ” 

“I ’m not goin’ to sell the house,” Kathleen 
cut in. “As long as paw lives, he ’ll have his 
own roof over him — ” 

“I don’t see that this roof is any more his 
than ours is,” Mrs. Buntz maintained. 
“He ’s got as good a right — ” 

And Cooney, foreseeing another quarrel, 
sneaked away to keep his appointment with 
Barney, two hours ahead of time. He had 
promised to tell no one of Barney’s plot — not 
even Barney’s mother. But he accompanied 
Barney to his home, to see that “wunder av the 
wurrld” safely housed for the night, and he 
did not try to disguise the fact ’from Mrs. 
Cook that her boy was “a janius.” 

“Faith, m’am,” he whispered at the door, 
“ ’tis beyond belief, but he ’s got thim two 
gurls quar’lin’ now about which one ’s to have 


BARNEY AND KING LEAR 257 

the honor — mind ye — av boordin’ me! Not 
a wurrd, m’am. Not a wurrd, on yer soul. 
It ’ud ruin all!’’ 

Mrs. Cook said not a word — ^not even to 
Barney. But if Barney had rewritten King 
Lear, and been crowned with laurel by all 
the Academies of civilization, he could not 
have come home to a more proudly devoted 
household than sat down with him at the table 
that night to hear him talk about his doings 
for the day. He saw it in their faces. 
“Waiter,” he said to Annie, “dish up the best 
in the house. I don’ care what it costs. I ’ve 
got my salary raised. Hurry up.” 


VII 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 
I 

T his was a warm afternoon in June. 

It was humid after a morning’s rain. 
And City Hall Square was at once hot and 
moist and noisy and crowded, so that the very 
air seemed to be stifled and perspiring, as 
if it were panting with uproar and exhausted 
by the persecutions of haste. Barney was 
standing in the oppressive shade of the World 
building, with some limp newspapers under 
his arm — disguised in an old suit of clothes 
that he had outgrown and a cap that he had 
once discarded — perfunctorily making a show 
of seeking customers, and vacantly watching 
the faces that passed. He was supposed to 
be on the lookout for a suspect who had 

^58 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 259 


escaped the surveillance of the Babbing 
Bureau, in Brooklyn; and he had been wait- 
ing so, for several days, at the Bridge en- 
trance, for the purpose of picking up the 
man’s trail again if he should happen by. 
But the continuous stream of traffic had put 
him into the day-dream of an idler who lolls 
on a bridge to watch running water ; and when- 
ever he became sensible of his surroundings it 
was merely to envy the crowd in front of the 
World's score-board, who could follow the 
baseball game — as he could not. 

A passer-by aroused him by offering him a 
nickel for a newspaper, and glanced at the 
front page with a hand still held out for change. 
Barney yawned as he counted the four cents 
into the open palm. The fingers closed on 
the money, but the hand did not move. Bar- 
ney, surprised, looked up from the hand to 
the owner of it. The man was reading head- 
lines so intently that he was unconscious of all 
else, and he was blinking at what he read, with 
his lips pressed together in some sort of in- 


260 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
stinctive effort to conceal any betrayal of the 
excitement that showed in his eyes. 

It did not take him more than two or three 
“bats” of the eyelid — as Barney would have 
said — to gather the meaning of the headlines. 
Then he hastily folded up the paper, thrust 
his change into his pocket and hurried away 
with the air of having picked up something 
that he wished to examine in secret. And 
Barney, after one blank moment of staring 
hesitation, followed him hypnotically. 

Those headlines announced, as Barney 
knew, that the father of Elizabeth Baxter had 
offered a reward of $5,000 to any one who 
could discover what had become of her. And 
Barney had suddenly found himself with what 
detectives call “a hunch.” He could not have 
explained it. He could not have defended it. 
But into his empty brain, on the instant that 
he had seen the man’s expression, there had 
come a conviction that this respectable-look- 
ing stranger had a guilty knowledge of the 
Baxter case. Of the dozen innocent explana- 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 261 

tions of the man’s manner, he could not have 
combated one. And he did not know enough 
about the case to judge what possible connec- 
tion this fellow might have with it. He was 
not even sufficiently conscious of his mental 
operations to ask himself whether he ought 
to leave his post at the Bridge to follow such 
a vague scent. He followed it as unreason- 
ingly as an animal that is carried away by an 
instinct. 

And once having abandoned himself to it, 
he was possessed by it to the exclusion of 
everything else. “Here, kid,” he said, hastily, 
aside, to the first newsboy that he met, “take 
my stock. I ’ll see you later” ; and he gave 
up his papers to the gaping newsie as reck- 
lessly as he had given up his post. He went 
along Nassau Street, looking anywhere ex- 
cept at the panama hat and blue-serge shoul- 
ders that he followed; but he did not see any- 
thing except these ; the rest was in his eyes, but 
not in his mind; and he had the large, idle, dis- 
interested stare of an operative who is taihng. 


262 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


He turned down Broadway, in this man- 
ner, expecting to see his man enter an office 
building, and ready to close up on him, so 
that he might not lose him at an elevator. At 
Liberty Street, he followed across Broadway, 
and saw his quarry making towards the water- 
front. And then he realized that it was after 
five o’clock and the man was a suburbanite go- 
ing home. He felt in his pocket to assure 
himself that he had his twenty-five dollars of 
expense money — given him to use, if he should 
need it, in following the Brooklyn suspect. 
He found it and kept his hand on it. With 
that, nothing could stop him. The man had 
no bag; he could not be going far. Once 
traced to his home, Babbing could be reached 
by telephone, and the Bureau could do the 
rest. 

And even this thought of Babbing did not 
halt him. It rather drove him on. Instead 
of stopping to reconsider what he was doing — 
in the aspect that it would wear if it ended 
badly — he was so obsessed by the assurance of 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 263 


its ending well that he hastened to meet the 
conclusion that should vindicate him. And as 
if the thought of Babbing were Babbing him- 
self pursuing him, he only glanced behind at 
it, and then hurried the more, to reach the safe 
end of the adventure before he could be over- 
taken. He had been too long bored by the 
routine of subordinate work that had no thrill 
in it. Here was a bit of scouting on his own 
responsibility — ^with the chance of a little dis- 
tinction, if he succeeded. The pursuing doubt 
of what would happen if he failed, only added 
the excitement of truancy. 

He came to the ferry house of the Jersey 
Central Railroad, so close on the heels of his 
‘‘subject” that he had to go ahead when the 
man stopped to buy more newspapers at the 
entrance. But inside the doors, Barney daw- 
dled until he was behind again, and only closed 
up to see the suburbanite show a commutation 
ticket at the gates. Barney was ignorant 
enough to suppose that the ticket was a pass, 
because the gateman did not punch it; but he 


264 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

was not too ignorant to know that he could 
get through the gates by paying his fare on 
the ferry — three cents — ^which he took from 
his newspaper pennies in his coat-pocket. He 
was puzzled to know how to discover for what 
destination he should buy a ticket; for if the 
man was traveling on a pass he could get oflP 
or on the train wherever he pleased, with no 
questions asked. 

A ferry boat was waiting in its slip, and the 
man entered the woman’s saloon while Bar- 
ney went in among the smokers. He had 
had enough experience in tailing to know that 
he ought not to be visible to his subject when 
he could cover him from ambush; and he 
walked confidently to the forward end of the 
boat, to wait there until his man should come 
out to disembark. He was worried about his 
railroad ticket. He foresaw that without one 
he would not be able to pass the gates in the 
railroad station; and he might not have time 
to run back to buy a ticket after he had seen 
what train he ought to take. 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 265 

While the ferry boat was threading its way 
across the trafHc of the river, he was busy de- 
vising stratagems to outwit the gatekeeper. 
He would pretend that his mother was on the 
train with his ticket. Or he would come run- 
ning, as an ofHce boy, with a verbal message 
to his employer, who was a passenger. Or he 
would say that he had missed a man in 
a panama hat and a blue-serge suit, who had 
his ticket; and had such a man passed the 
gates? 

Considering his clothes, he decided that he 
had better say he was traveling with his 
mother, who was a cook, newly hired to work 
in some country place of which he did not 
know the name. He was to have met her on 
the station platform. He had missed her. 
She had his ticket. He wanted to go and look 
for her. 

That ought to be convincing. He decided 
to try it. The ferry boat was nosing and 
bumping its way into its dock at Jersey City 
when the panama hat came out with a crowd 


266 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
of passengers, and Barney manoeuvered to get 
a good look at the wearer of it. The sum of 
his observation was that the man appeared 
inoffensive. He was well-dressed, but his 
clothes showed both the wear that they had 
had and the care that had been taken of them. 
He carried gloves — though it was so warm — 
but they were soiled leather gloves that had 
evidently weathered the winter. He was an 
oldish young man, an office worker probably, 
well-featured, of the lean type. Barney had 
often delivered telegrams to his kind, in down- 
town offices, behind spindle railings at secre- 
tarial desks. The only thing unusual about 
him was the set look of distant expectancy with 
which he kept his eyes fixed on nothing ahead 
of him, uneasily, excitedly, but with no guilty 
suspicion of any one around him. 

He pushed his way through the stream of 
passengers that went ashore with him, and 
Barney had to race to keep up. In the train- 
shed, he went directly to his train, with the 
assurance of custom, knowing exactly where 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 267 

to find it. And to Barney’s relief there were 
no gates and no gate-keepers. A board at 
the track-end gave a list of the stations at 
which the train stopped. The last of these 
was “Somerville.” Barney said to himself 
“Me fer Somerville” — and followed down the 
platform. 

He was led to the smoking car, which was 
hardly more than half a car, because the for- 
ward part of it had been cut off to make a bag- 
gage room. He took the seat nearest the rear 
door, and watched some of the suburbanites 
getting squares of heavy cardboard from the 
baggage man to use as card-tables on their 
knees; they sat down in fours, here and there, 
to play. The Panama hat was invited to join 
some acquaintance at euchre, and declined; he 
was engaged with his newspapers and a brier 
pipe. A man directly in front of Barney was 
hailed to make the fourth in the game, and 
threw aside his paper to accept.. Barney 
leaned over the back of the seat and took the 
paper. At that moment, the train started. 


268 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
and his young imagination — that had been 
reined in restively while he watched — ^was set 
galloping with the forward motion — so that 
when he opened his paper, to study out the 
Baxter case, he could no more control his at- 
tention than if he were in school with a text 
book, on a Spring day, beside an open window 
that overlooked a baseball game. 

He frowned diligently at a portrait of 
Elizabeth Baxter smiling, on the front page, 
— a dark girl of twenty, naively handsome and 
self-assured. He gathered from her picture 
nothing more than a feeling that her smile was 
incongruous. He did not understand that the 
photograph had been originally published with 
the announcement of her engagement to marry 
a conspicuously wealthy old bachelor named 
Huntley — an occasion for which a smile was 
fitting. He stared at the Panama hat. He 
looked out of the window absent-mindedly. 
He smiled to himself. He came back to his 
newspaper with a guilty start. 

This is what he should have been reading: 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 269 


Miss Elizabeth Baxter was the only daughter 
of D. B. Baxter, who was vaguely described 
as a “well-known Wall Street man.” She had 
left her father’s apartment in the Antonia one 
morning, to go to her dressmaker; and she had 
telephoned to her maid, two hours later, that 
she would not be home for luncheon. She had 
not returned for dinner either. Nor for the 
night. Next morning, private detectives, se- 
cretly employed by her father and her fiance, 
had started on her trail, and by the end of two 
weeks they had found that she had been to 
her dressmaker’s at ten o’clock in the morn- 
ing; that she had bought a novel in a Fifth 
Avenue bookshop at half-past eleven; that she 
had telephoned at a quarter to twelve from a 
candy store where she had bought a box of 
chocolates ; that when she left the candy store, 
she disappeared “as completely as if the earth 
had opened and swallowed her.” No trace of 
her had been found. No word had come from 
her. At the end of two weeks, her frightened 
parent appealed to the police, and the police 


270 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
counseled secrecy, because it would be easier 
to discover the criminal if no alarm were 
raised. 

They discovered nothing. There was no 
reason why she should have run away. She 
had no enemies, no love affairs — except the 
legitimate one with her fiance — no troubles 
either of body or mind, no secrets that the po- 
lice detectives could so much as raise a suspi- 
cion of. 

Then her father offered a reward and gave 
his story to the newspapers. Another “mys- 
terious disappearance!” Lists were printed 
of the names of girls who had been reported 
“missing” to the New York pohce in the year 
past, and they made an alarming array of vic- 
tims for “a plague of crime” that threatened 
“every home.” If the “rich and beautiful” 
Elizabeth Baxter were not safe, whose daugh- 
ter could be considered beyond danger? She 
had been destroyed by the White Slave trade 
and the “poison needle.” She had been 
snatched away from crowded Fifth Avenue, 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 271 

at midday, in broad sunlight, and barred up 
in some noisome den of abductors. She would 
be murdered now — to escape detection — if she 
had not been murdered already. 

Her case had been discussed, that morning, 
in the operatives’ room of the Babbing Bu- 
reau, but Barney had heard only one author- 
itative remark upon it, and that had been re- 
peated as Babbing’s diagnosis: — ‘‘When a girl 
buys a book and a box of chocolates, she ’s go- 
ing on a railroad journey. This poison needle 
talk is all bunk! Did you ever try to give a 
hypodermic injection? Next thing, these 
newspaper boys will be running stories of girls 
being followed on Fifth Avenue and tattooed 
down the back without knowing it!” 

Barney said “Somerville” to the conductor, 
and gave him five dollars, and did not even 
count the change. “When a girl buys a book 
and a box of chocolates, she ’s going on a rail- 
road journey.” He was in a state to find a 
confirmation of his “hunch” in the fact that 
he was on a railroad journey himself, and he 


272 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
gazed out the window at Newark Bay as if 
he expected to discover there some trace of 
her passage. She must have looked out at that 
water as she went by. 

The man in the Panama hat did not disen- 
gage himself from his newsapers until the car 
had almost emptied itself at Plainfield. Then 
he began to make preparations for his arrival 
at the next station — which the conductor had 
announced as ‘Tindellen” — and Barney, 
watching him, took his own paper up again, 
to shield himself behind it, in case the man 
should glance at him in passing. 
^Tin-delVnr—^Tin-delVnr 

Barney spread his sheet and hunched his 
shoulders. The train had stopped before he 
dared look aroimd; and when he reached the 
car platform his man had already disappeared 
in the station. 

‘‘This isn ’t Somerville,” the conductor said. 

Barney nodded. “ ’S all right. Keep the 
change.” 

He felt cocky. Not only because he 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 273 

thought he had traced the Baxter mystery 
to its lair in Findellen, but because Findellen 
was so small a village to his superior metro- 
politan eye. It had one “front” street of 
shops about as imposing as a row of booths on 
Coney Island, and its old frame station house 
was little better than a Harlem shack to Bar- 
ney. He entered the waiting-room and found 
it empty — except for a row of benches around 
the walls, some country cuspidors, and an old 
base-burner, cold and rusty, that was still 
standing where the winter had left it. He 
screened himself behind the stove to spy 
through the open doorway, and he saw his man 
cranking a little touring car in which a woman 
sat at the steering wheel. An automobile! 

An automobile presented such an unex- 
pected difficulty to tailing that he stood gaz- 
ing at the car as if it were an impassable ob- 
stacle that had suddenly blocked his way. It 
moved from the square of the door frame. He 
hurried to the door. The machine was already 
disappearing up the street that led straight 


274 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
from the station into the hills behind Findel- 
len. He pulled down the peak of his cap and 
started after it desperately. 

Crossing the road, he crossed the car’s trail 
in the paste of red Jersey mud that remained 
from the morning’s rain; and three of the 
wheels had left smooth tracks where the car 
had turned, and the fourth had imprinted the 
indented pattern of a corrugated shoe designed 
to prevent skidding. Barney slowed his pace 
to study it. He glanced at the sky, that 
showed sunset colors. He drew a dollar watch 
from his trouser pocket and found it five min- 
utes after six. He put his cap back from his 
forehead thoughtfully, and turned along the 
main street — away from the trail of the auto- 
mobile— to find a hardware store. He could 
not follow a track in the mud after dark. He 
had to have a lantern. 


II 

At seven o’clock, with a little electric lamp in 
his pocket, he was climbing the hill road be- 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 275 

hind Findellen, munching crackers and cheese 
that he had bought from a grocery store, and 
keeping an occasional eye on the corrugations 
of the automobile track, to make sure that it 
was still with him. The road slanted obliquely 
up the side of a ridge that was too steep to be 
cleared for farming, and Barney could see 
nothing but bushes, trees, and undergrowth. 
He could hear nothing but the twihght song of 
a wood-bird. He neither looked nor listened. 
In animate or inanimate nature he had, at his 
most leisurely moments, only sufficient interest 
to throw a stone at it. Just now, he was not 
in a holiday mood to try his aim on anything. 
He had natural human instincts, even if he did 
not belong to a gun club. 

At the top of the hill the road paused 
at the turn to show him a panorama of the 
flats in which Findellen and the railroad lay, 
under an evening mist. He did not admire 
the view, although it was admirable. He 
thought the street lights made a poor showing 
after New York — as if the place were living 


276 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
by candlelight in a bare world that was too 
large for it. 

He turned his back on it and came over 
the crest of the hill to see the valley to which 
the road was leading. 

It was a charming valley, with the last light 
softening its pleasant alternations of field and 
orchard, smooth meadows and clustered woods. 
To Barney it was merely “goose pastures,” as 
Hudson Street calls the green suburbs. It 
was empty of shop windows, bill boards, mov- 
ing picture fronts, newspaper bulletins, hurdy- 
gurdies, passers-by, street traffic, peddlers, or 
any of the noise and movement of affairs that 
make life in the open air interesting. And it 
was inhabited by poor country boobs who lived 
in loneliness, with their eyes on the city, grow- 
ing cabbages to sell in town. 

There could be no doubt that the man in the 
Panama hat was a crook, concealing himself 
from the police. That was the only reason 
why he should live in such a place. Well, it 
was probably “one better than being in jail.” 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 277 

The road descended a more gradual slope 
than it had climbed, and Barney trudged along 
doggedly, with his mind on his destination. 
He expected to be walking all night, because, 
of course, the man would not have an auto if 
he lived within easy walking distance of the 
station. And Barney intended, when he had 
located the house, to wait until daylight to 
reconnoiter before deciding how to make his 
approach. 

He crossed a bridge that was little larger 
than a culvert over a stream that was no more 
than a liquid note among pebbles. There was 
a clearing on his left, with a house in it and a 
bam ; the automobile track did not pass it more 
indifferently than Barney did. The road 
dipped and rose again, turned through woods, 
came out on open fields, dropped through a 
grove of spruce, crossed another little hollow, 
rose to a sharp hillock, and started down a 
stony incline towards the broad valley that 
Barney had seen from the top of the ridge. 
The auto track did not show on the stones. 


278 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
but on every rise and fall of the road there 
were water-bars that held little pockets of 
mud, and through these the trail was clear. 
Barney heeded nothing else — neither the lights 
of the farmhouses, nor the barking of farm 
dogs, nor the cool accompaniment of an even- 
ing breeze that came ruffling and rustling 
through the grass and the foliage. 

It was growing dark, and he was planning 
to use his electric lamp, when a dog rushed 
barking to the roadside from a little bungalow 
that looked out over the valley from the edge 
of the final descent. It was an aristocratic 
colhe dog, and Barney growled at it, class-con- 
sciously. It worked itself into a nervous 
frenzy of vociferous disapproval of him. He 
hissed and spat at it like a cat, with the pur- 
pose of enticing it down the road to a place 
where some lilac bushes would hide him from 
the house. There he intended to “give it one 
in the ribs with a rock” ; but as soon as the col- 
lie saw him stooping for the stone, it fled, 
growling. He threw his stone at a convenient 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 279 

oak-tree — whose air of dignified indifference 
provoked the insult — and went on. 

He was near the bottom of the hill when he 
crossed the muddy pocket of another water- 
bar and saw no auto trail in it. And his ex- 
pression of idle mischief changed at once to a 
look of intent and crafty determination. He 
glanced behind him, to make sure that he was 
concealed from the cottage. Then he crawled 
through an old wire fence, into the woods on 
the opposite side of the road from the cottage, 
and disappeared, crouching, in the underbrush. 

The dog, after some distantly defiant 
barks, fell silent. In a few moments, the 
whole hillside, relieved of Barney’s disturbing 
presence, settled down into dim meditative- 
ness, peacefully. The cottage was a simple, 
shingled bungalow, with a chimney of field 
stones that sent up a quiet curl of smoke; and 
it sat there, weather-browned and unpreten- 
tious, looking out over the valley, like an old 
woodsman in a wilderness serenely smoking his 
pipe. A hermit thrush began to sing its de- 


280 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

votional roulades in the distance, and its song 
gave an interpretative voice to the grave and 
limpid beauty of the evening; and the scene 
held that song in its setting as harmoniously as 
the pale green sky above the sunset held the 
sparkle of the first star. Nothing could have 
looked less like the hiding place of a criminal 
mystery. 

Darkness had settled down on peace, and 
the moon was rising on it, when Barney issued 
unexpectedly from the bushes and began to 
scuffle noisily up the road again to attract the 
collie. He had his coat over his arm, and 
when the dog came barking at him he swung 
the coat at it, and retreated trailing it, and 
flicked it into the dog’s mouth when it pursued 
him. As soon as the collie had a fighting hold 
on it, he began to yell shrilly: “Here, you! 
Lea’ me alone! Here! Leggo, will you? 
Here, you! Call off yer dog!” He pulled, 
and the dog pulled, backing into the gate ; and 
when a man came running from the house to 
see what was the matter, the case against the 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 281 

dog needed no telling. “Leggo my coat,” 
Barney was panting. “I ’ll kick yer head off! 
Leggo, will yuh! Leggol” 

The man was Barney’s suspect, without his 
Panama hat. 

“Colin!” he cried. “Colin! Stop it, sir!” 
He caught the dog by the collar and cuffed 
it. Barney dropped his end of the coat. 
The man got it away from the dog as a woman 
ran out, in a kitchen apron, calling, “ What has 
happened, Charles? What is it?” 

He replied: “Colin has attacked this boy.” 
“What for? What was he doing?” 
“Search Barney answered. “He 

did n’t say a word. He just jumped out an’ 
grabbed me, an’ I dodged, an’ he got the coat.” 

The dog was barking protestingly, but he 
could not make himself understood. 

“Bad dog!” the woman scolded him. “Go 
in the house, sir. You bad dog, you. Did he 
tear it?” 

“I guess so,” Barney said. “I heard it rip.” 
“Give it to me. I ’ll mend it. Oh, you bad 


282 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


dog. How dare you !” She took the coat and 
turned back to the house with it, driving the 
crestfallen dog before her. 

‘T hope he hasn’t spoiled your coat,” the 
man apologized. ‘T never knew him to do 
such a thing before.” He added suspiciously: 
‘T could have sworn he would n’t attack any 
one — unless he was badly provoked.” 

“ That ’s all right,” Barney said. ‘Tf I ’d 
seen him first, he wouldn’t ’a’ got me. I 
didn’t notice him in the dark.” 

“What were you doing?” 

“Mindin’ my own bus’ness.” 

“Do you live around here?” 

“Nope.” 

The man was scrutinizing him as well as he 
could in the faint moonlight, and Barney’s 
manner resented the scrutiny. 

“Where are you from?” 

Barney did not answer. 

“You ’re not a country boy.” 

“Never mind about me'* Barney said. 
“Gi’ me the coat an’ I ’ll get along.” 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 283 


‘'You ’re from the city, aren’t you?” 

“What city?” 

“New York.” 

Barney looked down at his feet, kicked at a 
tuft of grass in the path, and did not reply. 

“What are you doing away out here?” 

“Answerin’ questions.” 

The man laughed. “What ’s the matter? 
Have you run away from home?” 

“That ’s all right,” Barney said. “I can 
take care o’ myself. If you ’ll gi’ me a glass 
o’ milk er somethin’, I ’ll call it square.” 

“There ’s a town just over the hill. Got any 
money?” 

“Sure. I ’m a millionaire. I ’ll split some 
wood fer you, if you ’ll gi’ me some bread and 
butter.” 

“All the wood ’s split.” He went down into 
his pocket and drew out a quarter. 

Barney took it, ungraciously. “What ’s 
the matter? Runnin’ some sort o’ joint in 
here?” 

“What do you mean?” 


284 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

“Well, first you got a dog that tries to chew 
me up, ’cause I come past the gate. An’ then 
you stand me off fer a bite to eat, like you was 
afraid to — ” 

“Not at all,” the man said hastily. “Come 
along. We can give you something to eat 
anyway.” He started up the path and Bar- 
ney followed him grudgingly. 

“Sorry if I didn’t seem quite hospitable,” 
he said, in an attempt at jocularity. “We 
haven’t any servant just at present, and my 
wife has to do the cooking. Sit down on the 
veranda here, till I speak to her.” 

“I on’y wanted some bread and butter — an’ 
somethin’ to drink.” 

“All right. Make yourself comfortable.” 
He waved his hand at a wicker chair and a 
hickory rocker on the veranda. Barney chose 
the wicker chair. 

There were no lights in this wing of the 
house, which overlooked the road. The only 
light that Barney had seen was shining on a 
bush from a distant window where some one 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 285 


was evidently busy in the kitchen; he could 
hear an occasional clatter of plates. Between 
him and the lighted window, the whole house 
was dark, but he did not know who might be 
watching him from that darkness, so he kept 
his eyes off it, and settled himself wearily in 
the easy chair, and put his head back against 
the cushioned head-rest, and showed no inter- 
est in anything. 

They found him apparently asleep there, 
when they came back— the woman with a tray 
of food, the man with a green-shaded reading 
lamp. The light woke Barney. He sat up, 
rubbing his eyes. They placed a porch table 
before him and arranged on it the tray and the 
lamp. 

“Pretty tired, eh?” the man said. 

Barney nodded, his eyes on the food. He 
reached a slice of buttered bread before the 
tray was on the table, and proceeded to “wolf” 
it. He did not look at his hosts. The lamp 
on the table shone full on him, and left them 
in obscurity. He pretended to be hungrily un- 


286 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

conscious of their amused scrutiny. When 
they spoke to him he answered with nods, his 
mouth full, his eyes scouting eagerly ahead of 
his appetite. 

The man sat down on the edge of the ver- 
anda, smoking his pipe. The woman cut the 
top off a boiled egg, poured Barney’s tea for 
him, and put cream and sugar in it. Then she 
drew up the hickory rocker beside the lamp 
and applied herself to the sewing of his coat, 
while the man began to sound and examine 
him with mildly humorous hints and queries. 

Barney did not need to invent the story 
which he allowed them to draw out of him. It 
was the story of a boy whom he had known in 
Hudson Street — a motherless newsboy whose 
drunken father used to beat him regularly, to 
make him give up the money he earned. He 
ran away and lived on the streets, supporting 
himself. Then the father put the police after 
him ; and he was arrested and sentenced to the 
Reform School, but his sentence was suspended 
on condition that he gave up his “bumming” 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 287 

and remained at home. When he could en- 
dure it no longer, he fled again; but this time, 
to escape the New York police, he went tramp- 
ing ; and Hudson Street heard no more of him. 

Barney’s manner accepted such a father as 
a natural fact of life, without any emotional 
embellishment or indignant comment. The 
woman put down her sewing, and poured him 
another cup of tea, and eyed him in silent pity. 
She was a capable-looking young housewife, 
of a prettily maternal aspect; and Barney’s 
face and hands needed washing. 

The man showed his sympathy by asking: 
“What do you intend to do? How do you ex- 
pect to make a living?” 

“Search Barney said. “I ’ll strike a 
town somewhere, an’ sell papers, er shine shoes, 
I guess.” 

The collie dog sat watching him distrust- 
fully, until he shared a slice of bread with it. 
He did so with the secret thought that he would 
have to “get next” to that dog if he was to do 
any sleuthing on the premises; hut he was 


288 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

aware of the glance that the couple exchanged 
when they saw him so forgive his enemy out 
of a natural kindness of heart. 

The dog seemed less touched than they. 

The man asked: “Where are you going to 
spend the night?” 

Barney answered: “I thought maybe 
yuh ’d let me bunk in yer hayloft.” 

He looked doubtfully at his wife. “We 
haven’t any hayloft,” he said. 

She put in: “He could have the maid’s 
room — over the kitchen.” 

“Yes. I suppose he could.” 

“I ’ll make it up,” she said. 

She left them. After a moment’s silence, 
the man followed her. And when they were 
gone, Barney turned to make a face, taunt- 
ingly, at the dog. 

He was sure, from their manner, that there 
was some concealment of guilt in the house; 
and he was satisfied that he could find out what 
it was, before morning, if they let him spend 
the night under their roof. 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 289 


III 

When they returned, he was apparently 
half-asleep again, and he mumbled a prompt 
acceptance of the woman’s proposal that he 
should go to bed at once. She led him around 
the front of the house to the kitchen porch, and 
the kitchen light was still the only one to be 
seen. Of the kitchen itself he looked only at 
the doors. One that was closed evidently led 
to the dining-room and the rest of the house; 
one that was open showed the stairs to the 
upper floor; a third was the back door to the 
yard ; a fourth under the staircase might be the 
door of a pantry. 

She lighted a candle and ushered him up- 
stairs to a tiny room that had a sloping ceiling, 
a single window in the gable end, and no door 
except the door to the stairs. At that side of 
the room in which there should have been a 
door communicating with the other rooms of 
the upper floor, there was a blank partition- 
wall of rough plaster. It was a satisfactory 


290 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


arrangement for isolating a servant from the 
family privacies in a small house, but it did 
not appeal to Barney. He had counted on 
being able, from the upper hall, to spy on what- 
ever was being done below stairs. 

The room was bare and clean, with no furni- 
ture but an iron cot, a kitchen chair, a sort of 
camp wash-stand, and a little dresser. ‘T ’m 
afraid we have n’t any night clothes that will 
fit you,” she said, putting down the candle. 

Barney replied ungraciously : ‘T ’d be 
asleep ’fore I could get into ’em anyway.” He 
did not wish to encourage her in any solicitude 
concerning him; it might prove embarrassing 
if she came back to see that he was sleeping 
comfortably. He sat down on the side of the 
bed and began to unlace his shoes. 

She accepted her dismissal. “Good-night,” 
she said. “We have breakfast about seven. 
I ’ll call you.” 

He mumbled “G ’night.” He dropped his 
shoe heavily on the floor as she descended; and 
though she closed the door at the foot of the 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 291 


stairs, and he could not hear her in the kitchen, 
he dropped the other shoe as noisily when he 
got it off. Then he stripped to his undershirt 
and trousers, blew out the light, threw himself 
heavily on the bed in the hope that its creaking 
would be audible, and lay on his back, listen- 
ing. 

He listened and listened, but he could hear 
nothing, except the incessant stridulant drone 
of insect mechanisms out-of-doors. 

He sat up to look out the window, and there 
was nothing to be seen but leaves and moon- 
light. 

He crawled to the sill in the hope that there 
might be the roof of a lean-to below the win- 
dow. There was none. And the moon was 
so bright that he could not have climbed out 
with any safety in any case. And there would 
be the dog to betray him, even if there had been 
no moon. 

He got his little electric lamp from his hip- 
pocket and tiptoed to the stairs. A cautious 
flash showed him the door below him. He de- 


292 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


scended, in the darkness, with infinite precau- 
tions, waiting and listening after every move- 
ment. There was no sound from the kitchen. 
And when he had lifted the latch and opened 
the door an inch or two, there was no light to 
be seen, except the moonlight that came 
through the kitchen windows. He shut the 
door behind him, to leave no evidence of his 
passage in case his retreat were intercepted 
and he had to hide downstairs. He moved 
inch by inch towards the closed door of the 
dining-room. He saw a faint crack of light 
beneath it. 

They were in there, then. If he could get 
that door open, perhaps he could hear them. 
He approached it stealthily. He raised his 
hand to the latch. A low growl checked 
him. 

It was the dog, in the dining-room. It had 
scented him. It began to bark. Some one 
called to it from the other end of the house; 
and Barney fied. 

But he did not fiee upstairs ; that would have 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 293 

been a final confession of failure. He made 
for the pantry door that he had noticed — in- 
tending to hide until the alarm had subsided — 
and when he plucked the door open, he found 
himself at the head of cellar steps. He went 
down them swiftly by the light of the pocket 
lamp, and stood waiting at the bottom, in the 
darkness, looking up, listening breathlessly, 
ready to retreat further if he heard any one 
coming. He was enjoying it like a game. In 
case he was caught, he had a story ready, to the 
effect that he had been too hungry to sleep, 
so he had sneaked downstairs to smouch some- 
thing from the pantry. 

In the cool underground silence, he found 
that not only could he hear the growling dog 
as clearly as before, but he could hear much 
more clearly the distant voice calling, “Be 
quiet, sir! Be quiet! What has got into that 
dog to-night?” 

He flashed a furtive light around him; he 
was in a little food cellar of hanging shelves 
and larder cupboards. He saw an open door 


294 DETECTIVE BARNEY 
that led through a stone foundation-wall into 
another part of the basement. And it was 
from this direction that the muffled angry voice 
seemed to come. 

He sneaked to that door as softly as a cat, 
barefooted on the cement floor. The dog was 
quiet again. In the doorway he could hear a 
distinguishable murmur of several voices 
sounding through the thin floor above and 
ahead of him. He stood there, grinning to 
himself in the darkness, at the end of his hunt. 

He had them. 

It was the man and two women, and he could 
hear them distinctly when he had picked his 
way to the farther end of the cellar, across the 
clutter of lumber and garden tools and pack- 
ing-cases and discarded furniture — misering 
the flashes of his lantern for fear some cellar 
window might betray a sight of him. And the 
first words that he heard connectedly, gave him 
the solution of the Baxter mystery. 

“But my dear Bessie,” the man was arguing, 
“if your father got your letter, why should he 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 295 

offer this reward? There ’s no sense in it. 
He can't have got it.” 

A girlish voice answered: “Yes. He 
did. I know why he ’s doing it, but I can’t 
explain without being unfair to Dad.” 

The woman murmured something reproach- 
fully. The man began to move, heavy-footed, 
around the room. “Did you tell him where 
you were?” 

“No. I simply told him not to worry about 
me — that I ’d be all right.” 

“Well, if he got the letter, he ’s concealing 
it from the detectives, isn’t he?” 

“I suppose so. Yes.” 

The man sat down, with a bump. “I sup- 
pose you know what you ’re doing, but I ’ll be 
hanged if I can see any sense in it. I ’m not 
thinking of myself, but if you ’re found 
here — ” 

“Well,” she said, “I ’ll go somewhere else, 
then.” 

There were confused words of remonstrance, 
of angrily apologetic explanation and self-de- 


296 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

fense, of affectionate reassurance. Out of it 
all, the girl’s voice rose impatiently: “Well, 
Dad ’s doing it to deceive Mr. Huntley. 
That ’s why he ’s doing it. He ’s in a — ^he ’s 
in trouble — money troubles. And he could n’t 
refuse his consent to our marriage — to Mr. 
Huntley. And I could n’t refuse to marry 
him, either — without making it worse for Dad. 
That ’s why I got engaged to him, in the first 
place — to get him to help Dad. And don’t 
you think Dad tried to force me to, either — or 
even asked me to — for he did n’t. And when 
I saw he was n’t going to help Dad till after 
we ’d be married — and he would n’t help him 
at all if I backed out of it — I — well, I ‘disap- 
peared.’ And Dad ’s just pretending he 
thinks I Ve been kidnapped, so as to hold 
Huntley. And Huntley ’s paying the detec- 
tives, and all the rest of it. People think 
we ’re rich, but Dad ’s lost everything, and we 
have n’t a cent, and unless Mr. Huntley helps 
him through with this scheme of his, I don’t 
know what will become of him.” 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 297 


She had begun to sob, and the conversation 
became an incoherent jumble of voices, con- 
soling her, sympathizing with her, reassuring 
her. Barney did not wait to hear it out. He 
had heard enough to satisfy himself. It was 
Elizabeth Baxter. She was hiding there. 
And overcome with a superstitious fear that 
now, at the very moment of success, something 
might happen to betray him and spoil it all, 
he started back to his room on tiptoe, holding 
his breath. 

That fear did not leave him till he had re- 
gained his room safely. There he allowed 
himself only an excited chuckle as he slipped 
off his trousers and hopped into bed in his 
undershirt. He gave his pillow a jubilant 
thump and butted his head down into it, hug- 
ging himself. Wait till he saw the Boss! 
Then he lay perfectly still, curled up in the 
cool sheets with his secret, smiling ecstatically. 
He could go downstairs in the morning, eat his 
breakfast in all innocence, and say good-by 
without letting them suspect anything, and 


298 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


slouch off up the road with his coat over his 
shoulder, on his travels again. And as soon 
as he was out of their sight he would “beat it’’ 
to Findellen, catch the first train to New York, 
and come dawdling nonchalantly into the Bab- 
bing Bureau to report to the Boss that he had 
found Elizabeth Baxter! 

He fell asleep while he was dramatizing that 
scene with Babbing — after he had worked 
Babbing up to such heights of admiration of 
his cleverness that the scene was already too 
heart-tickling to be anything but a dream it- 
self. 


IV 

In the morning, everything happened very 
much as he had planned. After breakfasting 
in the kitchen, he got away without betraying 
himself to any one but the dog, at whom he 
winked triumphantly as he departed. He 
made short work of the road to Findellen, 
thanks to a passing farm wagon that gave him 
a lift. He arrived at the railroad station only 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 299 

a few minutes before a train full of commuters 
returning to New York for their day’s work. 
And when he looked from the bow of the ferry 
at the sky-line of the city, he found it quite as 
he had pictured it, except that it showed no 
excited appreciation of the change that had 
come, over night, to the status of the Baxter 
case. 

His interview with Babbing was the only 
event that did not work out as he had expected. 
Babbing was walking up and down his private 
office, thoughtfully, when Barney entered to 
see him. He asked, at once, “Where have you 
been?” but without looking at Barney, and 
without stopping in his walk. 

Barney closed the door. “I been searchin’ 
fer this Elizabeth Baxter — an’ I found her.” 

Babbing continued with his thoughts. It 
was some time before he asked, almost absent- 
mindedly, “Where?” 

“Out near a place called Findellen, livin’ 
with some folks she knows.” 

“What took you out there?” 


300 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

Barney described his expedition, from the 
moment that he had sold a newspaper to the 
man in the Panama hat, down to the success- 
ful issue of his adventure, when he had stood 
in the cellar of the bungalow and heard Eliza- 
beth Baxter overhead. 

Babbing had seated himself at his desk, in 
his swivel chair, but he had turned aside from 
Barney with his eyes on the window, non- 
committally. Barney, standing before the 
desk, with a hand on a chair-back, like a boy 
before his teacher, went from assured eager-’ 
ness to uneasy apprehension as he talked. 
He looked anxiously at Babbing’s plump in- 
scrutable profile when he had finished. There 
seemed to be something wrong. 

Babbing asked: “What do you mean by ‘a 
hunch’?’’ 

“Well, gee,” Barney said, “the minute I saw 
that guy readin’ the paper, I knew he was 
wise to somethin’ — ” 

“You knew it? How?” 

‘T — don’t know. I guessed he was.” 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 301 

“What were you doing when he came up to 
you?” 

“Watchin’ fer the Brooklyn fellah.” 

“What were you thinking about?” 

“I— I dunno.” 

“As a matter of fact, you were n’t thinking 
of anything, were you? Mind perfectly 
blank?” 

Barney did not answer, and Babbing 
wheeled around in the chair to face him. As 
their eyes met, Barney turned pale. 

“Got another hunch, have you?” Babbing 
said fiercely. 

Barney stiffened to meet the shock. 

“You ’re fired,” Babbing said. “Sit down.” 

Barney stumbled and sat down weakly in 
the chair. 

“You ’re fired for leaving your post with- 
out permission.” 

Barney pleaded chokingly: “Well, gee, 
Chief—” 

Babbing stopped him with a gesture. 

“I ’m going to see this man Baxter, pri- 


302 DETECTIVE BARNEY 

vately. He has concluded a consolidation of 
water power companies out West and Huntley 
is president of the new concern. It ’s in the 
morning papers. Now, if what you over- 
heard is true, he ’ll pay the five thousand dol- 
lars’ reward as soon as he understands that we 
claim the money without making public any- 
thing about the case — even to Huntley. 
Understand?” 

Barney had heard, confusedly, but he had 
not understood. He had been trying to gulp 
down a constriction in his throat. 

Babbing nodded at him grimly. ‘T ’m will- 
ing that half of this money should go to you. 
You ’re wasting your time here. What you 
need more than anything else, just now, is an 
education. Twenty-five hundred dollars will 
pay your way for a year or two — ” 

‘T — I don’t want it. Chief. I want to — ” 
‘Tt does n’t matter what you want. You ’re 
discharged from this office and you can’t come 
back until you ’ve learned to read and write 
and s'peak English.” 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 803 

Barney’s heart began to beat again. “Will 
you take me bach?'^ 

“If you want to come — then — ^yes. Glad 
to have you.” 

“Well, gee, Chief — ” Barney was smiling, 
almost in tears. 

Babbing continued quizzically, settling back 
in his chair. “You have the making of a de- 
tective in you, I ’m sorry to say. There ’s no 
doubt of it. And if you want to make a living 
out of it, I can’t stop you. It ’s as good a way 
as another, I suppose. You either have the 
aptitude for it, or you haven’t. It isn’t a 
science. It ’s an art. You can’t reduce it to 
rules. It ’s intuitive. All the science in the 
business can’t take the place of the ‘hunch.’ 
That ’s why I ’m discharging you. If you 
can get the right hunch, all you need is an edu- 
cation in order to make a success of yourself. 
Understand?” 

“Yes, ’r,” Barney beamed. 

“Very well, then,” Babbing rose. “Go 
home and tell your mother. I ’ll be around to 


304 DETECTIVE BARNEY 


see her to-night, after I Ve settled with Bax- 
ter. I ’ll arrange with her about your school- 
ing.” 

“How long will it be?” 

“How long will what be?” 

“Before I can come back?” 

“That depends on how you apply yourself 
to your studies.” 

“Gee,” Barney said, “I ’ll ’ply myself all 
right.” 

“Good,” Babbing held out his hand. 
“Good-by meanwhile. And good luck.” 

Barney shook hands shyly. “Thanks, 
Chief. The same to you.” 

“All right. Run along now.” 

Barney hurried obediently to the door. 
“I ’ll be back,” he grinned, “before you miss 
me — wit’ a leather medal.” 

“If you come back wit’ dat Bowery accent,” 
Babbing said, to a letter that he had opened, 
“I ’ll throw you out the window. Get out of 
here.” 

And Barney went, giggling, with his very 


BARNEY HAS A HUNCH 305 


ambiguous past happy behind him, and his 
equally ambiguous future very promising be- 
fore. 


THE END 










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